


A Certain Point of View

by LukeMaynard



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alderaan, Canon Related, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Deleted Scenes, During Canon, F/M, Gen, Guilt, Implied Sexual Content, Minor Canonical Character(s), Missing Scene, Multi, Plot Twists, Regret, Secret Relationship, Subtext
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-11 09:23:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 23
Words: 42,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15312441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LukeMaynard/pseuds/LukeMaynard
Summary: "Obi-Wan never told you…"With those words, Vader shook our faith in Obi-Wan as a reliable narrator, and told us there was more to his story than we knew. This is an AU story (…or IS it?) that takes place DURING Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, a story that was told—and can be retold—in the editing. The story changes nothing you see onscreen—yet reveals a secret that changes everything.





	1. OPENING CRAWL / Chapter 1: Patience

**Author's Note:**

> INTRODUCTION  
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
> What you are about to read challenges many of the things you assume to be true about the Star Wars saga. But painstaking care has been taken to dovetail all that you're about to experience into the events as they unfold in canon. Shot-for-shot, line-for-line, this story retraces the steps of the franchise (especially Episodes III and IV), and disagrees with none of what you've seen. And yet, you may see a completely different story being told through familiar lines and events, and in the spaces between them. In the pages to come, you will see that that many of the truths we cling to—about the Star Wars you think you know—depend greatly on our own point of view.
> 
> Whether this amounts to an AU story or not is up to your interpretation. The novella began as an effort to provide in-world answers to what some people have considered "flaws" of the films. Why is the Millennium Falcon so maneuverable in The Force Awakens, and so clumsy in A New Hope? How did Obi-Wan age so quickly between Episodes III and IV? Why does the greatest duel of the entire saga, Obi-Wan and Vader's final battle, look as if it's the worst-choreographed duel ever filmed? 
> 
> These questions and others are answered in this story, in ways OTHER than deferring to the limitations of the early production.
> 
>  
> 
> SOURCES  
> ~~~~~~~~  
> This "hidden-canon" tale is first and foremost indebted to George Lucas, especially to his 1977 film Star Wars. I've tried to remain faithful to "A New Hope" most of all, as most of this book is contained in the timeline of that film. But I've made use of the 8 numbered episodes (to date), Rogue One, Solo, and yes, even the Star Wars Holiday Special. I think the two Ewok TV movies were the only ones not referenced here—though I managed to slip in a reference or two to the Droids cartoon somewhere. 
> 
> I am also indebted to Brian Daley's national public radio broadcast of Star Wars, which filled in many significant details cut from the final film and fleshed out the events surrounding it. Some of what's here is drawn from the "deleted scenes" of A New Hope, which were lost on the cutting room floor and have only survived in the radio drama.
> 
> This story also incorporates information from Star Wars: Rebels and The Clone Wars, from the licensed Marvel comics in 2015, and also the old Marvel Star Wars comics of the late 1970s. I made use of numerous official and unofficial sourcebooks, of numerous Legends novels, of maps and other information from the d6 and d20 Star Wars roleplaying games, of the X-Wing and Jedi Knight video game franchises, and of several tie-in books, and of the diligent work done by fans on Wookieepedia. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this amazing universe I've come to play in.
> 
> A BRIEF ADVERTISEMENT  
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
> Fanfic must be free, and should be free. The fanfic community is a giving one. But many people who write fanfic (including me) have other lives writing original stuff commercially. If you enjoy this story, and want to support what I do, the best way to do that is by checking out & supporting my original work at http://LukeMaynard.com. Learn more about my writing & music, check out my new album, DESOLATION SOUND, and subscribe so you never miss an update!
> 
> Thanks so much for your time and support! Now, with that out of the way, let's begin with the sacred words, as we have been taught:
> 
>  
> 
> **a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. . . .**  
> 

#  **STAR WARS**

**A CERTAIN POINT OF VIEW**

   

Obi-Wan Kenobi is dying. After

nineteen brutal years alone in the

harsh deserts of Tatooine, the last

Jedi Master prepares himself to meet

his destiny, obsessed with safeguarding

a tragic secret he cannot bear to confront.

  

Meanwhile, a daring victory above Scarif

has cost the devastated Rebellion dearly. In

a brutal assault, the evil lord DARTH VADER

has recaptured the ship carrying the stolen plans

to the DEATH STAR, and it seems as if all hope is lost.

 

When the unlikeliest of heroes in the Outer Rim band

together to give a dying old knight one final chance for

atonement, the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance.

Throwing off the cloak of tragedy and failure he has worn

for far too long, Obi-Wan must either embrace the powerful

Dark Side energy in himself to defend the galaxy against its cruel

enemies, or resist it by finally making his peace with the truth he has

spent his long, haunted exile trying to deny . . . .

**Chapter 1 : Patience**

 

There are three cornerstones to classical Soresu: defense, insight, and patience.

He had learned the first two as a young man, when he understood the art to be something like a combat style. Soresu, then, was a way of swinging your lightsaber, a way of catching attacks, even blaster bolts, and repositioning them with surgical precision. To a young man, Soresu was a blade art, a school of fencing that took the already strong defenses of a young body, and through the introduction of mystic insight made them impenetrable.

The patience, though, came only with time. Like a synstone hut in the desert, cured to perfect hardness over long years of exposure under twin suns, patience had to be hard-baked. But patience was the old man's virtue, the master's virtue. And only in its completion did the hermit understand that the lightsaber was merely a wand—a shimmering finger of enlightenment that pointed always to the truth, but held no truth within itself. Soresu—and all the classical forms, he imagined—were at their most advanced levels not fighting styles at all, but paths of living. Take away the saber, the tool of killing, and the art was not crippled, but perfected.

When the Great Drought came, the saber wouldn't even ignite anymore. The sand here had a way of getting into everything—even mechanisms long sealed by a master's hands. They'd been the hands of a younger master, who built his weapon with no great patience. The edges were flush, they were precise, but they were not perfect. There was always a flaw somewhere. And after eighteen years of waiting, the sand found its way in.  _It gets everywhere_ , a sulking Anakin had once told him. The boy had been right.

It was hubris to think that it wouldn't get everywhere, in the end. The sand knew patience. Tatooine was a very old world, even as far as planets went. He had thought Master Yoda to be patient, once. But the sand had waited for billions of years. It had waited since before the Grand Master was born. It had waited since even before Yoda's entire homeworld had formed from cosmic stardust. Before that, there was this sand, drifting on ancient winds, waiting to fulfill its ten-billion-year destiny, to creep into the mechanisms of one imperfect lightsaber and grind down a few key parts of the emitter array.

It was a good place, Tatooine, for studying Soresu. It was a good place for learning about patience.

When the Great Drought came, patience was all there was. It outlasted the sandstorms. It outlasted the spare parts. It outlasted the water. It outlasted whole settler encampments—then outlasted whole tribes of Tusken Raiders out on the Jundland Wastes, who had grown too dependent on their moisture raids. They, too, were lost to the sand. Perhaps, in another billion years, everything here would be swallowed up by the long-suffering desert.

When the Great Drought came, so did the true mastery of Soresu that had eluded him for most of his life. Already overtaxed by the barren, empty air, the hut's little vaporator was destroyed in the first of the Jundland sandstorms. After that, there was only the water in the tanks; after that, there were only the stray droplets that could be brushed out of the condensers. When they were gone, if he rose from his hibernation in the coldest hour of night, there were the traces of condensation he licked off the sandy walls of the cellar with the relish of a Galactic Senator at a high feast.

When that, too, was gone, there was only the Force. And the Force would sustain him, for a time, but it would not prevent a mortal man from dying. The Force was, in its essence, a perfection of the natural truths of the universe—not a denial of them.

The storms had been quick to shut down all travel. Only the Jawa sandcrawlers, those ungainly shapeless behemoths of Outer Rim determination, still roamed the Wastes unchecked. When even the dewback had died of thirst, there was nothing to do but wait. And so, when the water was gone, he waited, and then waited. And then he learned what waiting was.

He began hearing voices in the second or third week—voices of doubt, guilt, sadness that seemed to whisper from the Dark Side. Trained as he was in the rudiments of medicine, he knew that delirium would set in, sooner or later. Perhaps that was all this was. In tune with the Force, spending more and more of his days in hibernation, he felt keenly the ruin of his body—the aging, the invisible war on his joints and organs as they became those of a dying man.

On the edge of the Jundland Wastes, a world twelve billion years old waited for a man to die. And that man waited out the immense patience of the world, until the presence of life came again to the rocky terrain—until he felt the stirring of life in the dead landscape as the scavengers came, eager to sort through the leavings of the dead—and perhaps, if they were lucky, to sell the supplies at cutthroat prices to what few survivors they could find.

He had sat down, nineteen days ago, as a vigorous man well into middle age. He rose now as a very old one. His clumsy animal body was filled with the heaviness of death, and he felt within him the lightness of his spirit rebel against it. With a mind to his purpose, and an old master's calm, he walked out on dessicated joints to meet the scavengers.

"Hello there," said Ben Kenobi.


	2. Spare Parts

The dusty crate was heavier than expected. Biggs groaned with effort as it lurched sideways coming off the speeder, and Merl Tosche had to catch the back side to keep it from tumbling straight into the sand.

"Careful, now, careful!" he spat.

Biggs braced himself against the station wall and hoisted the crate up onto his knee.

"I got it, I got it." He said. "What've you got in here, black holes?"

"Power converters," said Merl.

"Not like any power converters I've ever seen," said Biggs.

"You can say that again," said Merl. "These things came off a Naboo yacht."

That was enough to get the flyboy's attention. The box seemed suddenly lighter, or the young man stronger, as he rushed it into the station to get the lid off. He was a year or two older than most of the hot rodders he ran with, but his smile gleamed like a child's as he staggered with his load.

"Windy's uncle looks after a star yacht," he grunted. "I helped him do the converters on that. They were half this weight. You mean to tell me the jawas carried this?"

"They can carry anything if it's worth this kind of money," said Merl. "Jirak swears up and down they came off a Theed Palace star skiff. You know anything about those?"

Biggs let out a low whistle. "You're kidding. A Theed Palace yacht? Where the hell did they find one? They're priceless. Custom-built for Naboo royalty. Fastest Republic ships ever made. If there's a dozen left in the galaxy, the Emperor owns ten of them." He tore the top off the box eagerly. Sure enough, the canisters were seamless, gleaming silver, branded with the Theed Palace stamp.

"They're fine work," said Merl. "You think they're the real thing? You're the one with his head buried in the spacer holos. I figured you'd know."

"They sell knock-offs in Mos Espa," said Biggs. "They're nothing like this. You put these on a starfighter, the manoeuvring you could get would be out of this world. On the original J-Type, though? You put six of these in series between the Sossens and the hyperdrive—you could hit point five in a jump burst."

"That's crazy," said Merl. "They haven't made a ship faster than point seven since the Clone Wars."

"Believe it, boss," said Biggs. "I know my starships. These things are worth more than everything else in the shop put together."

"They're only worth what somebody in Anchorhead will pay," said Merl. "Not a credit more. Don't forget that."

Biggs hoisted one of the converters into the light, marvelled at the way it caught the rays of the twin suns. It took both hands to lift even one. Polished to a mirror edge on all sides, it made everything else in Merl Tosche's station look dirty and lived-in.

"Why would anyone part these out?" he asked. "They're a matched set. Custom pieces for a hand-built star skiff. The Imperials have nothing in their whole fleet this fast. Do you know what the Rebel Alliance would pay for an intact J-Type?"

"I don't want to hear any of that Rebellion crap," said Merl.

"A lot of money," said Biggs, pivoting the conversation. "A  _lot_. Who would part this out?"

Merl shrugged. "Someone who doesn't want to be seen selling some Naboo prince's yacht, I guess."

"You don't think they're stolen, do you?"

"I don't think  _I_ stole them," said Merl. "I bought them cheap, but fair and square, from Jirak. He bought them even cheaper from some desert scavenger, some old canyon rat who basically sold them for water."

"Bad luck," said Biggs. "Makes sense. I thought the Drought wiped them all out."

"All but one, apparently," said Merl. "He must've saved them for a rainy day."

"Rainy day," Biggs laughed. "That's funny." He put the converters back in their foam housing and lifted the dusty crate onto the top shelf with almost religious reverence.

"Can you imagine putting even one of these on a Skyhopper?" he asked.

Merl shrugged. "You'd break your damn neck."

"You'd be surprised," said Biggs. "Some of the kids coming up are good. Real good."

"High praise coming from you, hotshot," said Merl.

"Yeah, well…if you paid me more around here, I might just buy one myself."

Merl clapped the dust off his hands. "You run with the racers and modders," he said. "I don't want to take these to Anchorhead if I can help it. If you can sell the rest to your lunatic friends by harvest season, I'll give you the last one."

The young man's eyes went wide. "I'll start coming in early," he said.

"And keep the place clean."

"Yes, sir."

"And shave off that stupid moustache."

"The fighter pilots all wear 'em."

"And once you get yours installed—listen to me, kid—don't take your hopper within a hundred miles of Mos Eisley or the Mesra Plateau."

Biggs nodded, suddenly serious.

"You  _do_  think they're stolen."

Merl shrugged. "I just don't want any trouble. And I think they came from someone who's trying real hard to keep their head down."


	3. ...But Not That Strong

He wept like a madman that night, when they had taken the power converters away. He had no tears during the exchange, not in his body and not in his heart. But there was nothing else to be done, in the end. It was this, or death; and so, while he had sworn to himself that he would never part out the yacht, it had to be done.

He was surprised, when the spit had returned to his mouth and the first traces of sweat to his wrinkled brow, that there were tears in him after all.  _Attachment leads to jealousy_ , Master Yoda had said once.  _The shadow of greed, that is_. But there, in the fading light of twin suns, for the first time in eighteen years, he at last unburdened himself and cried—not for the loss of a stupid spaceship, but for something much more. He wept for the greater, more secret wounds he had reopened by plundering the wreck.

_You promised yourself you would never let the ship go_ , said the voice of his delirium.  _You swore it in your heart. But then, you have always been a good liar. No Jedi ever lied as well as you, Obi-Wan._

That name.

_Obi-Wan_.

He did not have to ask where the voice came from. With his own voice hoarse from disuse, in the stillness of the hut, he answered it aloud.

"I will not be tempted," he croaked.

_It makes no difference,_  said the voice.  _Even the Dark Side will bring you no relief, now that you can never leave. You will die in the sand, now; far from your enemy. Far from your revenge_.

He took a long, slow breath of the freshly humidified air. "Revenge is not the Jedi way," he said.

_You are strong, old man_ , said the Dark Side to his heart.  _But not that strong._

"There is no emotion," said Ben Kenobi. "There is peace."

_You know that is a lie_ , said the Dark Side within him.

And the Dark Side was right.

Ben could not have explained, even to himself, what made him bring the little wooden box up from the cellar that night. But he brought it from its hidden place, and held it in his hands, sensing it. Sensing…  _him_.

_You have failed_ , whispered the Dark Side.  _You thought you could train him as well as Yoda. How many have died, how many worlds, because you failed?_

"You claimed him," said the old man. "You will not claim me."

_How many, Obi-Wan? Too many?_

"Too many," he said at last.

_Is a million lives too many? Is a thousand?_

"Leave me alone."

_One, then. One life._

With a set jaw, he flicked Anakin's blade to life in his hand. The years had been kind to it. The emitter crystal had aged some, hardened and cured by the desert air, and the searing beam that erupted from his hand shimmered a pale, ghostly blue now, its original richness and colour lost. But the blade was responsive, instantly, after eighteen years.

It had been made by a master. Anakin's natural talent had been unrivalled, after all—in this, and in a great many other things.

_The Force was strong in him. So strong. You were too weak to save them, in the end._

Setting the weapon aside, Ben Kenobi looked down at the wealth of supplies the sale of the hyperdrive system had brought him. There was the water, of course—tanks full enough of water to last the drought and well into the safe harvest season. But there was food, too, and medical supplies, and enough spare parts to keep the little homestead running until the storms had gone. It was through these supplies that he rummaged, exploring with the aching hands of age the smallest and most delicate of the all-purpose utility parts.

He found what he was looking for in the third bag, and laid the little pieces out on top of the chest. As the light grew dim, reaching out with the Force more than his own eyes, he skilfully broke down the emitter matrix of his own broken lightsaber, seeking out the point of failure in the weapon. He worked in silence most of the night, until sunlight came again to the hut; but when he lifted the familiar weapon, its fully functional killing blade surged out in a blistering column of searing light. This, too, was the weapon of a master.

"Good," said the hermit.

_Good_ , the Dark Side agreed.


	4. A Presence

 

The hulking  _Devastator_  roared silently through hyperspace with an eerie serenity. Only onboard, in the pressurized hallways of manufactured durasteel, could the desperate rumble and whine of the behemoth's engines be felt. On the bridge, although the ship surged through space faster than light itself, Captain Wermis could not stop looking over his shoulder. The repulsorlift doors were still and silent—for now—but any moment, now, they would yawn open to reveal a dark visitor. The captain had only a few moments in charge of his own bridge, and resolved to use them.

Taking a moment to steady his quaking voice, he cleared his throat and motioned to one of the engineers.

"Sir?" the Imperial officer responded.

"Recall the supply access turbolift on Deck Two and have it standing by," he said. "Send a crew down to prepare an escape pod. Get it done by the time we come out of hyperspace."

"As you command."

It was refreshing to hear those words again, even now with his fate rushing up to meet him. Although he was the  _Devastator_ 's commander of record, there was no question who was in full control of the ship. The monstrous Sith Lord who had ordered this jump was taking an incalculable risk, targeting an obscure Outer Rim world almost at random. And when that risk inevitably failed, Wermis had no intent of being the nearest scapegoat for that failure.

"Captain?"

Wermis snapped out of his thoughts and turned to the engineer. "Go on."

"We're coming up on the Tatoo system. Shall I bring us out of hyperspace?"

_That would bring him running._

"Negative," said Wermis with feigned confidence. "Take us all the way in to Tatooine. Right into outer grav. Pull out as late as you can. We wouldn't want to spoil the surprise."

The engineer nodded. "With due respect, sir…there are three dozen inhabitable systems in the Arkanis Sector. The Rebel ship could have made a short-haul jump to any one of them on this lane."

"One world's as good as another, then," said Wermis.

"If we guessed wrong," said the engineer, "they'll have all the time they need to calculate a second jump before we get another chance."

The turbolift hissed and Wermis's heart sank as the door slammed open.

"Let's hope we guessed right," he whispered. Behind him, the terrible breathing. The long shadow.

"Bring us out," he ordered, and turned to face his inexorable fate.

The Star Destroyer burst from another place into the dark expanse of common space, shuddering as it hit the trace gravity of the binary stars and fought to steady its incalculable mass. Seeming at first a thousand miles away across only twenty feet of durasteel floor, the Dark Lord of the Sith came towards him, mood nearly unreadable. But Wermis had grown so accustomed to that regulated breathing that he could tell it was off-pace—faster than usual. Was he angry? Was he eager? Or was his terrible armour simply preparing him for the fight to come?

The black armour was dusty and smelt faintly of ozone. He'd been fighting already.

"T-Tatooine, my lord," Wermis stammered. "As you commanded."

As if the captain had said nothing, Darth Vader strode past him to the observation port of the bridge and looked out on the stars. Wermis looked, too, searching the blackness for some glimmering speck, some spark of hope that would save him from fatally absorbing the Dark Lord's failure. But the space before them was too impossibly vast to be sure.

They stood in silence a long moment. Wermis was nearly in tears. His thoughts drifted to the service turbolift, to the escape pod, to the bleak and desolate Tatooine surface. He wondered if he might make it, if he bolted. But he knew he would not.

"Lord Vader," called the engineer, as if the captain had never existed. "Scanners pick up a passenger transport taking evasive action.  _Corvette_  class."

"That's it," said Vader. "Engage pursuit. Target their main reactor with forward batteries, and direct the assault commander to prepare a boarding party."

Wermis breathed a sigh of relief as the tension in his chest collapsed. But it was perhaps too audible a sign, as the Dark Lord hesitated before repairing to the Assault Deck.

"Your fears have betrayed you," said Vader. "See that in the future they do not betray me." He strode off the bridge at that, and was already gone when word came up from Deck Two that the crew sent to prepare his escape pod had been found littering the hallway, strangled by an unseen hand.

As Wermis received the news with cold horror, the turbolift behind him leapt to full speed, carrying its brooding passenger nearly the full height of the ship to the hangar below. The change in pressure, in gravity, brought a searing pain to the places where the armour scratched at his raw flesh—and that pain brought him focus.

The Emperor had demanded absolute containment of the situation. That much had already failed, and it was only through the Force, or luck, or maybe even both, that he had caught them immediately upon their escape from Scarif. The ship had jumped to hyperspace almost instantly, far too fast to have made instant calculations for a vessel its size. So the ship had been prepared for a jump to Tatooine from the beginning, even before the battle had been joined. That intrigued him and concerned him.

There could have been no way of knowing the little ship's destination, but for a familiar twinge he felt rippling through the Force. Even as his body betrayed him, as his anger powered the abilities he despised and weakened the ones he desired most, his insight had become incalculably powerful: if he had not reached across worlds, not exactly, he had felt an energy, a peculiar strong tremor that led him the only way it could have.

Who but his old master would lure him to the world he so despised? Who even knew of the forsaken, Hutt-controlled rock? Only Obi-Wan, now, knew of Anakin Sywalker's beginnings. Only he would think to hide on the one planet where a storm of old emotions—even love—interfered with the purity of Vader's grip on the Dark Side. Only Obi-Wan would have lured him to the place where he was weakest to end their conflict at last. With an eagerness he dared not admit, even to himself, Vader prepared himself to meet his destiny, and to finish what he had begun.


	5. Fever Dreams

 

_Obi-Wan…_

Ben Kenobi awoke easily enough. His senses were still finely honed; and if his ears still heard the strange roar of thunder on the wind, how much more keen were the ears of his heart, which felt the surge of hostility, felt the dozens who died screaming as the spectre of the Dark Side fell over them.

He had been meditating more and sleeping less as his spirit grew in strength and his body weakened. There was no denying that in dreams his powers had grown: Qui-Gon had told him that crossing over does not come all at once, but—as with all things—through patience and insight. Perhaps he had begun crossing already. He rose slowly, more slowly than usual. He felt the sickness in him that had been growing for more than a year—the dry places in him that had stayed dry, even after the water returned. He felt the Force move in him, felt its ripples retreat from dying tissues and pool in the places where life was yet strong in him. He felt it tremble as a conflict raged, both within him and in the sky far above.

This part of the desert was quiet and dead, now. Not even the Sand People had survived this far out. Amidst the stark lifelessness of the area, the desperate energy of the dying far, far above him only echoed more loudly. He could not see the ships from the ground; they were too far for that. But the thunderous echo—they were close enough to the atmosphere for that—and the tiny speckles of flared light were the clear earthly signs of a monstrous disagreement between capital ships. He wondered how many others looked skyward to that sight, how many knew what a dark sign it was that the Empire had come out this far.

He cast his eyes to the stars but could not see them. The afternoon sky blazed bright and blue-white, like Anakin's lightsaber. It stung his eyes and scorched his upturned face, but in his mind he was far away, imagining distant worlds and faces.

It was time, he thought, for a trip to town. Every point of contact was a risk; but an Imperial capital ship over Jabba's world was a serious matter to anyone. Staying hidden required information, and information did not come easily. Without reconnaissance, he would have to confront the boy directly.

He did not know if he was ready for that.

But if not now, when?

He set out at nightfall, unafraid of what might lurk beneath the dead sands, and more wary of what hung in the sky far above them. Even if swallowed whole by some of the larger predators—immense, slow-metabolizing, cold-blooded things—you could survive in the cool wetness of their gullets for long, painful days. Get caught without shelter under the full force of the summer suns, and you could be dead within hours. It was no pleasant walk, to be sure. But Ben Kenobi was patient, and resilient, and haunted. Any one of those could drive a man, and he was all three.

 _Soon you will die_ , said the Dark Side.  _And all for nothing_.

"We shall see," said Ben.


	6. The Passengers

 

_He is here._

It was his second shipboard assault of the day, and even the Dark Lord was tired.

Exhaustion, in its way, was a safety function of the life support. His blasted lungs were delicate structures, and sustained exertion had damaged them before. But the Force would carry him even when the broken machine of his body would not, and it was not for such simple concerns that he hesitated now.

From the beginning, the Rebels' desperate assault bore all the hallmarks of his old master. Daring assaults against superior forces with little chance of success, as he had once said, were "his speciality." Obi-Wan was never reckless—not tactically—but paradoxically, the Jedi Master's caution and resilience made him especially suited to the feats of near-lunatic courage in which they had once indulged together.

At first, he had his doubts as to whether Obi-Wan had taken a direct hand in the attack. He had not shown himself in the attack on Scarif, not even when he might have been useful. The Rebels on the surface would not have been so easily fenced in and wiped out, he thought, with Kenobi leading them. And yet, there was something about the attack, and about the slight tremors in the Force aboard the  _Profundity_ , that reminded him of his old master. He took an awful chance jumping to Tatooine—but here was the Rebel ship, as he must have known it would be.

And somewhere on that vessel, at long last, his old master was aboard. There could be no denying it, now.

It was his pleasure, usually, to board first, ahead of his troopers. He relished the terror of the desperate soldiers as he cut through them alone. But Vader did not dare underestimate the cunning of his old master, and he did not dare walk into a trap. As the boarding shuttle latched to the airlock and its cutting torches went to work, he directed the first wave of stormtroopers to the front. If his boarding tactics were known to Kenobi, the stormtroopers would take the brunt of any trap, and he would follow behind to settle their score once and for all.

The torches hissed as they pierced first the outer airlock and then the inner. Stormtroopers poured into the breach. A chorus of blaster fire erupted from the stark white halls of the Rebel ship. And still he waited, reaching out with the Force. As he predicted—as Kenobi must have known—coming back to this world of bittersweet memory dulled his perceptions, made him less astute through the Force than he ought to have been. But Kenobi's presence was here, very close by. The closest they had ever come since...

Vader stretched out his feelings, hunting, seeking—but his hatred, boiling in him now, made any fine sensing impossible. He thought, in some deep place, of his homeworld, of his old life, of all the thousand ways he had learned to hate them. At the center of them all was Obi-Wan's betrayal, and there the hatred was too much for even him to harness as a weapon. Through the Force, he cast his terrible gaze over the ship, but it brought him no greater focus. He found that in his anger he could not sense Kenobi's presence at all—only broadcast his own. He should have known Kenobi would go into hiding here. The closer Kenobi came to his old homestead, the more muddled Vader's perceptions became, and the weaker his grip on the Dark Side.

As his anger grew, the Rebels felt it in the corridors of the little ship, and it shook them. Their aim faltered as they trembled. Slowly, the tide of the assault turned and the stormtroopers forced their way into the ship.

The Rebels died screaming, not at the hands of Vader's greatness, but to the clumsy shooting of the lowly foot soldiers. That, too, was a frustration and a slight. Vader fought to control his anger, harnessing it, ready to bring it to bear, and stepped at last into the breach.

There was no trap waiting for him. Only the remains of a terrible firefight as two squads, boxed into a narrow hallway, had each gone down destroying the other. He looked down at the bodies as he passed, checking the blast points, searching for signs that Obi-Wan's lightsaber had bounced the bolts back into them. But it was clear at once—this was only an ordinary firefight, and a sloppy one at that.

The tremor in the Force, that slightest of signatures, was still around him. But he could not place it; and the more it frustrated him, the more fixated on it he became.

The sweep of the ship, for what it was worth, was routine. But Kenobi was nowhere to be found; fatigued as he was, limited in his powers and confused by emotions too long buried, Vader was so bent on the futile search that it was easier to conduct interrogations by hand. He had long enjoyed the effect it had on his men, and on the enemy, to crush their throats with the Force; now, unwilling to split his focus, he absently seized the surviving captain by the neck and hoisted him with the strength of his armoured skeleton alone.

"Where is your commander?" he said evenly, coldly. "Where is he hiding from me?"

"I am the commander," he croaked. "I am the captain of this consular ship."

"Where is Kenobi?"

"I don't know," croaked the captain. "No one on board by that name."

"You cannot deceive me," said Vader; but even as he said it, he knew the captain was telling the truth. Had Vader been  _wrong_? Had his powers diminished that much? Kenobi  _had_  to be here. He had been sure he felt his master's presence, here, on board—but now, at last, he was beginning to doubt it.

As he pondered his own failing, at the frayed edge of his famous good humour, one of the squad leaders approached him, having completed the sweep of the ship's systems.

"The Death Star plans are not in the main computer," he reported.

 _The plans._ Yes. That was what they had sent him to retrieve. What he had failed to contain. There was no more time for personal vendettas—only for the will of the Emperor.

"Where are those transmissions you intercepted?" Vader demanded, changing tack. "What have you done with those plans?"

The interrogation was as short as it was fruitless. The Force betrayed him in his search; even his mechanical grip betrayed him. Crushing his throat with the Force, Vader might have skirted the line between the Rebel's life and death with a delicate hand for hours, coaxing valuable information out of him. But the mechanical servos of his hand lacked such precision; they were clumsy tools for crushing and destroying, and they did their job too well. As the captain twitched feebly in his grip, resisting his will, he felt the hand tighten as if far away from it, felt the bones in his valuable prisoner's neck crumple and cave under his metal fingers. The secrets of Captain Raymus Antilles died with him; and Vader was left imprisoned in an exhausted suit, holding a useless body, finding no guidance in the Force as his focus gave way to anger and he jerked his armoured head left and right, seeking the Jedi who was simply not there. With disgust he threw away the body.

"Commander," he ordered, boiling over, "tear this ship apart until you've found those plans. And bring me the passengers. I want them  _alive_!"

The troopers were moving by the time he said it. He knew now there was no Jedi to be found aboard the ship. That familiar ripple of consciousness was suddenly gone. Perhaps he had imagined it. Perhaps it was the planet's influence, or those blasted twin suns, weakening his grip on the Dark Side. But at least the plans could still be found.

He stepped over another body. Dead. Dead. Dead. He yearned for a survivor to terrify. Their reaction to him was empowering; always it was the same. To the Rebels, who had heard only rumours of him, he was a shadow, a ghost story, an invincible black spectre of the Dark Side. He revelled in the power. It made him feel whole again. But beneath the armour, beneath the burnt necrotic skin, he felt keenly his weakness. He had reached Scarif too late; he had failed aboard the  _Profundity_ ; he was failing now aboard the  _Tantive IV._ Until those plans, the Emperor's plans, were in his hands, nothing he had done today would be considered a success.

Dead. Dead. So few of them aboard, but they had fought to the bitter end. The casualties did not matter—he could always get more stormtroopers—but the courage and coordination of their last stand troubled him. Vader had overseen a thousand such massacres, perhaps. Sometimes, they were even ready for him; the Rebels were well-trained now, and their counterattacks were fierce. But always, when you slaughtered enough of their friends, the order broke down.

There was something different about the way these men fought together, perfectly coordinated and with unscathed courage, even to the last man.

The old masters—before Kenobi—had ways of swaying the odds. Yoda's presence on the battlefield, it was said, could make ten troops fight like a hundred. But the art of battle meditation was lost, now: to his knowledge, Kenobi had never mastered it. But the old man was full of tricks. Even surrounded by the dead, Vader was uneasy.

When word came over the comms that they had managed to take one— _one_ —prisoner alive, he had a difficult time measuring his steps. He thirsted for her terror; he craved it. He slowed his pace consciously as he came down to the main hallway, savouring the shock he knew his entrance would cause…

"Darth Vader," she snapped, almost before he entered the hallway. "Only you could be so bold."

He waited, a moment too long, for his ventilator to fill his lungs to reply, and she continued to hiss and spit at him in front of his own men. Even Commander Jir, dumbstruck at his side, could do nothing to interrupt the young woman's tirade.

It was the last of his patience. He pressed the Senator calmly, keeping his voice even, narrowing the focus of his anger to her, probing for her emotions, determined to provoke her to fear even if he had to use the Force to do it. But this tiny woman, half his size, unseasoned in war, somehow shrugged off his will. It was impossible and he could not explain it. Her resilience was like nothing he had ever encountered. But his failure to intimidate her was the last frustration he could accept from this miserable day. He would have killed her on the spot, if he'd had the plans in hand, or even another prisoner to interrogate. But there was nothing to be done now.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she scolded him—and kept going. He could take no more.

"You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor," he barked. "Take her away!"

The plans were gone. The survivors were dead. The stormtroopers had witnessed a slip of a girl give him a dressing down and walk away unharmed. And Kenobi was nowhere to be found after all.

"Holding her is dangerous…" Commander Jir advised, nipping at his heels without a moment's pause. After only a few moments with Senator Organa's uppity daughter, the men had already begun to second-guess his command.  _His_  command.

Vader gritted his blackened teeth. This insufferable day was far from over.


	7. One More Season

 

Hardship brings change. So it was in the animal kingdoms of a thousand worlds, and so it was among the moisture farmers. It had been only a couple of years since the Great Drought, and already the condensers hawked in Anchorhead were high-efficiency, sand-proofed marvels that could be slotted into the old consumer vaporators without replacing the whole system. Ben counted his dwindling profits from the power converters, and considered whether he might replace the condenser on his own little vaporator, and how he might get the replacement unit all the way out to the hut. He had walked to Bestine, and taken the shuttle from there to Anchorhead, and even then, he knew his limitations were growing.

"Old man," the scrawny merchant shouted. "Old man! You think you can't carry it home?"

Ben looked up at him, drew back his hood ever so slightly. "How did you know?"

"Everyone asks," said the merchant. "Desert folk."

Ben smiled. "We're all desert folk."

The merchant shook his head. "You? You're very far out the desert. You live in the desert folks' desert. Anchorhead? Might as well be Mon Cala, compared to the far side of the Wastes. I say, can you afford  _not_  to carry? You won't get lucky twice."

"In my experience," said a voice, "there's no such thing as luck."

Ben didn't even need to turn around. "Hello, Owen," he said.

"Hello, Ben," said Owen Lars. "What brings you in from the Wastes?"

"Looking for news," said Ben. "Something's happening up there."

"I saw it," said Owen. "Luke saw it."

Ben hung his head. "I thought he might."

The farmer shrugged. "It's all he's been talking about for two days. Thinks it's a big battle of some kind. Is he right, Ben?"

Ben nodded. "Yes, he's right."

"It's going to light a fire under him," said Owen. "Biggs is back from the Academy now, too. That's not going to help."

"It's more dangerous now than ever," said Ben. "You  _must_  keep him on the ground."

"You obviously don't know the kid," said Owen. There was judgment in him; Ben could have felt it, if he hadn't seen it in the farmer's eyes.

"The Drought is the perfect excuse," said Ben. "Business must be very good for a moisture farmer after that."

Owen nodded. "We do all right."

"Tell him that you need the extra hands."

Owen nodded. "Then what? I've used that line before. And even if he does take it, it'll buy us a season at most."

"The Academy admissions follow the harvest," said Ben. "If he misses the next round, he'll be grounded another year."

Owen sighed. "He's not going to be happy with me," he said.

"I'm sorry," Ben offered.

The two had wandered away from the condensers into a quiet corner of the shop. Owen leaned in close.

"You could come see us," he said. "Do that thing you do. Persuade him to stay on the ground. Your way."

"I'm afraid that's impossible," said Ben.

"He's asked about you once or twice," Owen said.

Ben sighed and wiped the sand from his face. "What do you tell him?"

"I tell him to keep away from you," said Owen. "Tell him you're crazy. I'm not even sure if I'm lying anymore, Ben."

"It's for the best," said Ben. "He can have a good life here."

"Some guardian you are," said Owen. "Leave Beru and me to do all the heavy lifting."

"I'm no guardian," said Ben. "I'm nothing at all. Just a hermit."

"Someday," said Owen, "you're going to tell me why it has to be this way. Why you can't see him."

"He mustn't know about his father," said Ben.

"On that point, I agree," said Owen. "But you're not telling me the whole story. Look, Ben, I don't want him to go any more than you do. But Anakin was exactly the same. I knew his mother better than I knew my own. If you believe what they say, she was…special. And I don't mean your whole Force business, either. It broke her heart when Anakin left…when  _you_  came and took him away."

"It was a different age, then," said Ben, not unapologetically.

"Did I tell you about Cliegg, Ben?" Owen asked. "About  _my_  father?"

Ben shook his head. "I've heard some."

Owen cleared his parched throat. "People thought it was the end of him when my mother died. He said he'd never love another woman after that. Not if he lived a thousand years. He said one great love of his life was quite enough. But then…"

"Then he met Shmi," Ben offered.

"I never knew what to make of that," said Owen. "She was more like a mother to me, in the end, than my real mother ever was. I loved Shmi too, Ben. I know better than anybody what that boy would've felt leaving her. I suppose that means I would've made a piss-poor Jedi, too."

"Love is not against the Jedi Code," said Ben. "Only...attachment."

"My father had two great loves in his lifetime," said Owen. "My mother, and Shmi. Two great loves. That's two more than your monastic lot would ever understand."  
 _Obi-Wan…_

 _"_ And I love two people as well," Owen finished. "I love my wife, my Beru…and I love my boy.  _Mine_.  _My_  boy. Not yours, and not Anakin's either, you hear me? And it's hard to watch him out here dirt farming. It's what I know. It's what I love. It was in my father's blood, and it's in mine. Cliegg Lars, moisture farmer, son of a moisture farmer. He even got off this rock one time, Ben. Hated it so much he came right back. If I'd had a right son, I suppose he'd carry on the same way. The desert sand gets in your blood, over time."

"I suppose so," said Ben.

"But Luke's not like us," said Owen. "Beru says so, every day. And he's not happy. He won't be, if I let him live and die out here as I've done. I'm more of a father to him than that old dead monster ever was. But this is my life, not his—and a father knows when it's time to let go. However much he hates it."

"Letting go is the highest form of love," said Ben. "There's more to being a Jedi than that—but you would not have failed the Jedi tests on that account. And you're a fine father, Owen Lars."

"Luke's not going to think so," said Owen. "Not when I clip his wings for another year."

"He will learn," said Ben. "When you are both old men together, he will know what you did for him."

"That's what it's about, isn't it, Ben? Fathers and sons. Always fathers and sons."

"And mothers," Ben added distantly.

"Yes," said Owen. "Mothers too. Especially them."

Ben had stopped to rest against the wall of some spacer's junk shop. He was looking frail, older than his years, and Owen didn't fail to notice it. It softened his heart a little to see the old man like this. He was sick. Owen could see it, even if no one else could.

"Look, Ben," he said, "I'll keep this routine up as long as I can. But Luke is his father's son. He slips away to go canyon-hopping with his Academy friends every chance he gets. I'll do what I can, but it's only a matter of time. I won't be able to keep him here, not for much longer. Not without something you're never going to give me."

"And what is that?"

Owen drew up his own cloak against the outside winds. "The truth," he said.


	8. A Long Time

 

Ben was so shaken by Owen's words that he left without the condenser. He spent the afternoon in the Anchorhead cantina, but there was no information to be had. None of the spacers who had come in past the battle had made it in from Mos Eisley yet. He'd have to go up there if he wanted to learn more, and he knew he couldn't risk it. It would be a few more days before traffic trickled in with firsthand knowledge. How many ships, he wondered? And what had brought them here?

 _You know what brought them here_ , said the Dark Side.  _It is your destiny_.

"I have chosen another destiny," said Ben. "The boy is my last hope."

 _You know why you left your whereabouts with Bail Organa. The war is still in you. Revenge is still in you. And how you must relish your chance for revenge. You have endangered the boy to get it_.

"The boy is safe!" said Ben. "Darth Vader will not come down to this planet again. He cannot. He cannot see us, he cannot track us. He is weaker here than anywhere in the galaxy." His hand went to the bundled lightsaber at his hip. He'd started carrying it again.

"And if he comes," said Ben, "I will finish what I began."

 _Good_ , said the Dark Side.  _But he will not come. You must go to him_.  _You must face Darth Vader again_.

Ben looked to the sky. The flashes of fighting had long since stopped; in truth, they had been over in a matter of minutes. But the ship was there; he could feel it. And in the clearness of the open desert, he could make out, on the edge of his powerful senses, a presence that was all too familiar.

"He will not come down," said Ben. "And I will not endanger Anakin's child. Not for revenge. Not for anything in this galaxy."

 _Yes you will,_  said the Dark Side.  _For just one thing, you will endanger him_.

Ben hitched a ride with a trophy hunter as far as Pika Oasis, and began the walk from there. In the blazing afternoon of the second day, he took shelter in a rocky Jundland cave. He was not far from home when he felt, sharply, the pangs of a feeling he had hoped never to feel.

Pain. Fear. The boy was in danger.

There was no avoiding it now. The Drought had hardened the Sand People. They would kill him, if the twin suns didn't.

Darth Vader was, in the moment, the least of his worries. The Tusken Raiders would kill Anakin's boy—Padmé's boy. Here and now.

It was only the memory, distant though it was, of Anakin's massacre of the Raiders that stayed his hand. There were few enough of them—and though his joints ached constantly now and his sickness grew, he felt lighter, stronger at the thought. But they, too, had weathered the Great Drought; they had lost many of their young, and were as wretched and pitiful a bunch of scavengers as he had ever known. It troubled him how strong the Dark Side had become, how clear its urgings were to him. It would have given his failing body the strength to kill them all, if he had drawn on it. But there were other ways.

Diligently he had practiced the whooping call of the lesser krayt dragon, which echoed so well in the rocky hills, and he put it now to use, bellowing at the height of his lungs as he clambered over the rocks. And though he hated to admit it, there was a much darker fear deep within him, and he let that fear wash over them as he came. They scattered like leaves before him, terrified, squealing. But they fled with their lives.

The boy was laid out flat on the floor of the dusty gulch. He was unmistakably Anakin's son. The long, lean body; the unruly mop of blond hair. Ben took his wrist to search for a pulse, but there was no need: the Force coursed so strongly through the boy that there could be no question he was alive. Ben laid his hand over the boy's brow, sensed the flow of that current, directed it to the wound on the side of his head. It was then he heard a noise of recognition—a noise at once familiar to him, even after all this time. There could have been no question this matter concerned him directly now. But his delight at seeing the old, familiar droid after so many years warmed his smile. For a moment, the weight of the dark side left him.

"Hello there," he said. "Come here, my little friend."

R2-D2 beeped his concern for the boy.

"Oh, don't worry," said Ben. "He'll be all right."

The boy— _Luke_ , she had called him—was already stirring. The Force was wickedly strong in him, like his father.

With the care he had held in check for too long, Ben helped the boy sit up, led him to a stone, and asked him of his business in the desert. Luke gestured to R2.

"I think he's searching for his former master," said Luke, "but I've never seen such devotion in a droid before. He claims to be the property of an Obi-Wan Kenobi…"

Spoken aloud, the name hit him hard, in the gut. He tried to hide it.

_Obi-Wan…_

He kept his calm, tried to conceal the impact. But her voice haunted him still.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi," he said. He let the name out easily, as if to convince himself the words had no power. "Obi-Wan…now that's a name I've not heard in a long time…a long time."

He felt very small and old, then. Very far from that name.

"I think my Uncle knows him," said Luke. "He said he was dead."

"Oh, he's not dead," said Ben. "Not yet."

Distantly, across the canyon, he heard the hunting shouts of the Tusken Raiders, regrouping and preparing to come in force. The charade could hold no longer.

"Of course I know him," said Ben. "He's me. I haven't gone by the name Obi-Wan, since—"

_Obi-Wan…there is good in him…I know…there is still…_

"Oh, before you were born," he lied. He remembered the boy, remembered cradling his tiny body. He was the firstborn, there in the medical bay… no. No.

 _This is your moment_ , said the Dark Side.  _Vader awaits you_.

Ben brushed the thought from his mind—or tried to. But Artoo had not come alone to bring his past roaring back. He had brought a protocol droid, a gold-skinned, roadworn Cybot 3PO unit—and Ben did not need to hear its voice to recognize it. It was Padmé's own protocol droid. The one from Mustafar…no.

Ben muttered something about getting indoors, though the worst of the sun was behind them. He needed to think, needed to make sense of these unsettling messengers. Why had they come to him? And why, first, to Luke? Was it ordained? Was it the will of the Force?

The pain in his chest returned as he bent low to hoist up the protocol droid. The Raiders had torn one of its arms off; in Luke's hands, held beneath his mop of wavy blonde hair, the golden arm looked so much like Anakin's prosthetic.

Ben shook the thoughts from his mind with determination and hoisted the droid into the speeder before slumping into the passenger seat himself. Stunned, speechless, and fighting a hundred old sentiments—light and dark—it was all the Jedi Master could do to endure the long ride in silence.


	9. Help Me

 

The terrible truth struck him as they crossed a stretch of desert that had no name. Artoo chirped and whirred excitedly nearly all the way home, much to the annoyance of his one-armed counterpart. Raised in the core, Ben had once had a good ear for Binary, as far as humans went. After twenty years, though, even basic concepts were difficult for him, and he could piece together the context of their mission only from the protocol droid's frustrated protests.

"This joint will never be the same, you know."

 _Curious beep,_  said the astromech.

"It's no use; the coupling's bent. My left arm will pull off like some modular attachment for the rest of my days. Oh, this is all your fault!"

_Disgusted whirr._

"If it weren't for this 'mission' of yours, we'd be safe in our new home."

 _Interrogative whistle_ , directly addressed.

"I don't  _have_  a sense of adventure. I have a primary function. And every faulty directive you follow makes it harder to perform."

 _Beeps_ —too rapid-fire to follow.

"And  _I_  was the protocol droid to a captain. And very close, mind you, to being assigned to a princess on a diplomatic matter of surpassing importance. Thanks to your meddling, I'm to become an overgrown interface module for farming equipment."

Ben's heart dropped in his chest at the mention of the princess as the little astromech whistled on. There could be no doubt, now.

"That is not for us to decide, Artoo. We only follow our programs."

 _More beeps—system beeps_. Something about Artoo's primary function.

"Yes, well, I'm going to regret it. And so will you, if you're not careful."

_Dismissive buzz._

"Just you wait."

The protocol droid—surely the one assigned to Padmé all those years—was as talkative as ever, even missing its arm. With a growing sense of dread, Ben took in all he could from them. He knew, by the time they had reached the hut, just who was aboard the vessel, and what had likely become of her. He knew, too, more clearly than ever, into whose hands she had fallen. There was no question; he was going after them.

 _I told you_ , said the Dark Side.  _I told you that you would endanger the boy_.  _You cannot escape your destiny. He will suffer if you bring him with you. He will suffer if you leave him behind_.  _But then, you've always wanted him to suffer—_

"Enough," Ben said so sharply that the others heard it. Luke looked over, concerned.

 _Perhaps the suffering of Anakin's child is part of your revenge, after all_.

"Turn here," said Ben. "We'll hide the speeder around back. You can't be too careful with the scavengers in these parts."

He faltered climbing down from the speeder. For just a moment, so briefly that it could have been the blazing sun, the strength left his arms and he used the Force to catch himself. There was no question; the boy would have to come. But how to turn his mind, now, after discouraging it for so long?

Tell him everything—no—almost everything.

Blame his uncle.

Give him the saber—Anakin's saber. Yes. Tell him that his father  _meant_  for him to have it. That following in his father's footsteps was his destiny.

But what if he  _did_? If he followed too long in Anakin's foosteps—would Obi-Wan Kenobi fail again?

If Vader— _Vader!_ —turned him to the Dark Side—how many more innocents would Obi-Wan's hubris destroy?

It didn't matter, in the end: Artoo's hidden message did its job all too well. Leia was beautiful, unspeakably beautiful, a little copy of her mother. And beauty alone was more than enough to draw the interest of a teenaged boy.

She looked nothing like Luke, of course. The farm boy was tall, lean almost to skinny, with his father's mop of shaggy blond hair, his strong jaw, his cheekbones, his way of walking. Even his whinging complaints sounded like Anakin's, a generation removed. With only the meagre tool set in Obi-Wan's hut, Luke reattached C-3PO's arm with natural, intuitive mechanical skill—just like his father.

But Leia was nothing at all like the impulsive, headstrong Anakin. She was Padmé's child, through and through.

Until the astromech's projection, until Leia's pleading eyes stole the breath from his old lungs and the sureness from his spirit, Ben had perfected the story he was about to tell. Subtlety and guile were weapons of the Jedi arsenal, and in his old age, he had come to master them all. He smiled at Luke, and offered him the gift of a father's weapon, and waxed philosophical on the nature of the Force and the Jedi. Luke's bright-eyed questions took him back to painful memories, but he had spent long years preparing himself for these moments. The words flowed from him eloquently, and Luke's questions were exactly those he had anticipated.

"How did my father die?" he asked. There was no great joy in the answer Ben had prepared, but neither was there great sorrow. It was too far from the truth for that. Just the same, it was a gentle conversation with few surprises— until  _she_  appeared on the table and looked up at him, and all his Jedi training fell away.

"I saw part of a message—" Luke warned him. It was not enough time to steady himself.

She was small but never meek, possessed of a quiet authority and a gentle voice. He had not seen her, not a holo nor a picture of her, since the birth. But she was unmistakable, even fully grown. Her round, doe-eyed face—Padmé's face, nearly—looked up at him with fear and earnest hope. Before she spoke, before she said a word, he knew that he would forsake every oath he had ever made to anyone. He knew that he would find her; and, if need be, he would die—or kill—to protect her. Only then did the Jedi Master understand Yoda's words. Only then did he know his true peril.  
"General Kenobi," she began. "Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars…"

The kindly smile, so carefully crafted, was gone from his face. For the first time in many years, he was frightened, and he could not hide it in his eyes. He had faced Jedi-killing cyborgs, his own apprentice, his own mortality. And none of them had shaken him like her. He fought for composure.

"Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi," she said.

There was no escaping the terrible weight of that name.

_Obi-Wan… is Anakin all right?_

"You're my only hope."

And in an instant, too brief an instant, she was gone.

He would take the droid to Alderaan, as she asked. And then he would find her.

And find Vader.

"You must learn the ways of the Force," he said to Luke, his quiet smile returning, "if you are to come with me to Alderaan." As expected, the boy was not so easily swayed—at first. Luke shrugged the powerful suggestion off without realizing it. The Force was strong in him, after all.

"Alderaan?" he said incredulously. "I'm not going to Alderaan; I've got to get home."

But Ben Kenobi had learned patience, and with patience came true mastery. And all manner of secret and subtle things could be done with that.

It took several hours, in the end, for Ben's will to have its effect. More than mere hours, it had taken the distance of a tragedy even he had not foreseen. Imperial stormtroopers were not known for moving so quickly; in truth, Ben's mind had been elsewhere and he had failed to think of how quickly they could reach the homestead. But the seed of Ben's powerful will had been planted, and even in the gifted but undefended mind of a Skywalker, it was only a matter of time.

With his world in ruin, with nothing left to hope for and every reason to fear, Luke might have sworn himself to a dozen destinies, standing there in the smoke and stink of the burned farm. Free at last, he could have shipped out to the Imperial academy after all. If his rage took hold of him, he could have taken his new weapon and gone after the local garrison who killed his family. If a boy's fear and uncertainty seized him, he could have fled to his circle of friends among the skyhopper crowd, drifted from home to home until he made sense of his life. Or, possessed of his father's cleverness and ingenuity, he could have exacted a terrible vengeance against the Imperial death squad by trading his priceless lightsaber to the Hutts in exchange for Hutt justice.

He could have done any number of things. But there had been a gentle hand on him as he stood upwind of the smoke. A master's hand was always gentle, when it could afford the time to be.

Obi-Wan waited patiently by the sandcrawler as the fussing protocol droid threw the Jawa bodies onto the fire. It was late afternoon when the speeder shot back over the horizon. Ben's guilt wrestled with his pride; he knew then the terrible tragedy that had struck, and felt keenly for the Lars family. But there was something dark in him, now, and it was growing. In spite of his Jedi discipline, Ben relished the thought that for all their strength, for all their unnatural, uncanny gifts in every skill and Force power under the suns, the Skywalkers were unstoppable outward aggressors—but lacked the inner strength, the true, unshakeable, quiet resilience, of a Kenobi.

"You must learn the ways of the Force," he had said, "if you are to come with me to Alderaan."

With an energy untempered by his grief, Luke leapt over the side of the speeder and ran to Ben's side.

"I want to come with you to Alderaan," said the boy. "I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father." He said the words earnestly, urgently, as if they were the only thing he had ever wanted.

Ben nodded, as if hearing those words for the first time, as if he hadn't been expecting the folded suggestion to take hold in time. But he returned to the speeder with a heavy heart, already knowing that after years of exemplary conduct in the Jedi Order, after striving his whole life toward the mastery of the Force, there was more power still to be had in his anger.


	10. Sorry About The Mess

 

There was much to be done in Mos Eisley, and doing it right took time. Ben had learned the secrets of the spacers, and had mastered the art of doing business without standing out. It would be impossible, of course, with the boy in tow. Anakin's son might have been a natural pilot, but the lifestyle of the hardened frontiersmen was foreign to him. With masterful control, he slipped away before Luke realized it, blending in, disappearing. In the swampy gloom of Chalmun's Spaceport Cantina, Luke stood out marvellously, a beacon of innocence concealing Ben's purpose as the Jedi master slipped through the shadows, moving from conversation to conversation with one eye on the boy, one on the Wookiee.

Known now to the Imperials as G5-623, the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk was little more than a slave farm; the proud Wookiees themselves had been branded as "non-sentients" by the Empire. A Wookie spacer, by default, was more likely than not an escaped slave, and would be both knowledgeable and motivated when it came to avoiding the Imperial hyperspace lanes. But for that reason exactly, making a beeline for the towering Wookiee pilot would brand him to anyone watching as a man seeking at all costs to avoid Imperial attention.

There was a delicate dance to this, an intricate series of steps invisible to the casual observer. But Ben had spent years learning the dance, and so approached the pilots with Imperial ties first, seeking passage through official Imperial channels as an old man with impractical requests. Slowly and deliberately, begging, demanding, grinning like an Outer Rim eccentric, he exhausted the goodwill of the reputable pilots one by one, and failed his way ever closer to the center of the bar, where the undesirable Wookiee waited. He was the pilot of last resort, or very nearly so; and as a hundred eyes followed the foolish old man from pilot to pilot, sneers of dismissive laughter began to echo in the air behind him. A horned Devaronian grinned at him devilishly from the shadows, delighting in his foolishness. The Imperial spies—those he  _knew_  to be Imperials—watched him for a time and then lost interest, just as he had hoped. Meanwhile, the steps of his secret dance became known to the Wookiee, who—it became clear—was not working alone. As he circled from one pilot to the next, Ben watched the Wookiee's eyes intently, watched his telltale signals to someone in the shadows. He was pulling work, Ben realized, for someone who did not want to be seen doing business.

A man so eager to avoid attention that he let an escaped Imperial slave make his contacts for him was just the sort of man he needed. There was something more to him, too: some raw glow about him. He was untrained, unfocused, like all born after the Purge—but the Force ran wild in him, too. There could be no mistake: Ben had found his pilot.

After that, the rest of the dance was frustrating. Eager to be on with business, Ben nearly let his haste give the game away. He locked eyes with the Wookiee, who nodded and moved to a vacant section of the bar.

Three more conversations to go. Then two.

Then one.

The last pilot between Ben and the Wookiee was a tall human, clean-shaven with dark sideburns, who had been audacious enough to wear a decommissioned Republic flight suit into the bar. He was an Alliance sympathizer, and easily recognizable as such. The kind of man a Rebel would trust.

Ben needed him to say no.

"I'm looking for passage to Alderaan," said Ben.

The pilot nodded. "I'm your man," he said. "I'm a Corellian. Name's BoShek. I know the Corellian System, I know the Corellian Run, and I know the Core Worlds as well as my own ship."

"What are you flying?" Ben asked.

"Light freighter," said BoShek. "She's called the  _Infinity._  YT-2200, heavily modified. Six passengers, more if you don't need much cargo."

"Class 2 hyperdrive," said Ben. "Not good enough."

"Like I said, old man," said BoShek, " _heavily_  modified. You ever hear of the Kessel Run?"

Ben shrugged. "I've heard it's closed for business. The Empire has posted interdictors all around the edge of the Maw after that slave revolt."

"There's ways around 'em," said BoShek. "If you don't mind a little gravity sickness, and your ship's fast enough. It's the smugglers' proving ground, now."

"And that's what you are?" Ben said disapprovingly. "A smuggler?"

"Not so loud," said BoShek. "I'm whatever I need to be. There's a hefty discount if you're hauling above-board, though…"

"I wouldn't say that," said Ben.

BoShek nodded. "What's the cargo?"

Ben smiled softly. "Three Rathtars."

The smuggler's eyes bugged out. "Rathtars?  _E chu ta_ , my friend. I'm not putting those on my boat."

"I'm willing to pay," said Ben.

"Yes, well, I'm not," said BoShek. "Where did you even find those blasted things?"

"Let's just say I have a very large friend," said Ben, "who is a certain admirer of exotic predators. He's grown quite bored with his rathtars, and is in talks—quiet ones, of course—to trade them to Alderaan's planetary zoo. There's return work, if you want it."

"No thank you."

"If you don't like rathtars," said Ben, "you should see what I'll be bringing back."

BoShek eyed him as if he were mad; then, with a thought, glanced at the Wookiee over his shoulder.

"I'm not your pilot," he said. "Look, why don't you try Chewbacca here? I'll save you the trouble of asking around. He and his pal are the only two lugnuts in the galaxy desperate enough to take on that load."

"If you're sure, then," said Ben, feigning disappointment.

BoShek nodded, glanced at the Wookiee again, and lurched off his barstool.

"Well…" he said. Gesturing again at Chewbacca, BoShek slipped away to try his luck in a bar with saner clientele.

"I'm looking for safe passage," Ben told the Wookiee. "Very safe passage."

" _Gwwwarrrf_ ," said the Wookiee. He had observed the smuggler's dance. He already knew Ben was serious. He already knew rathtars had nothing to do with it.

"Two passengers. Two droids. No cargo."

Chewbacca nodded his assent, and stood to his full height. He made eye contact with the man in the shadows. They shared a wordless conversation in the space of a second. The Wookiee began to lead Ben over.

A feeling of hate and hostility hit Ben like a brick as he stood up.

He'd been half-watching the grizzled, scar-faced little traveler since he came in with the hulking Ponda Baba, one of Jabba's regular spice smugglers. Both of them were deeply rattled by something, the small man especially. He was angry, and afraid, and had come clear across the galaxy to get away from…something. He had the aura of a man on the run, and that made him unpredictable. Anger and hatred swirled in him with wild terror; and these past few days, Ben sensed those forces even more acutely. But the bar was a swirling morass of hostilities. Even through the Force, it was difficult to sense the sharpness of the scarred man's murderous intent until it came to a head.

Something had happened while he was distracted. The troublemaker had taken offense to Luke; boasting and hassling, he was fixing for a fight. Anakin would never have stood for it at that age. With diffident arrogance, he would provoked the fight, and ended it decisively. But Luke was not entirely Anakin's son. With grace and gentleness, he let the provocation go.

"I'll be careful," he said.

His gentleness only provoked the troublemaker's fury further. "You'll be dead!" he barked.

Ben stepped in. Eyes were on him now—on them both.

"This little one's not worth the effort," Ben said dismissively. "Now let me get you something."

He had seen bar fights before through the eyes of the Force. Most of the time, just before the violence broke, the aggressors would flare up with an anger that was easily sensed. But the scarred man had grown so accustomed to violence that his emotions did not telegraph his intent. It was with the eerie calm of a habitual murderer that he seized hold of Anakin's boy—Padmé's boy—and smashed him down hard, through a table, to the hard cantina floor. In his youth, even with no warning, Ben might have caught him. Obi-Wan, the Jedi, would have caught him. But Ben's reflexes were too slow to stop the assault. He watched helplessly from the prison of his old body as the boy went down hard, shocked, afraid. Writhing at his feet, Luke groaned softly, gasping for breath. He looked up through the pain with utter astonishment, as if it were the first time he had felt the hand of human cruelty.

It was Padmé's face, that face of disbelief, confusion, pain. It was the shocked, sad face of innocence betrayed—the face she had worn on Mustafar.

_Obi-Wan…_

He could still feel the radiant heat of the lava. It still burned his face. The strength roared back into Ben's limbs—but not from the source he had been taught to channel. It coursed through him, and took him, and for the briefest of moments he fell to its embrace.

The scarred man was going to kill the boy, now. His murderous anger snapped into sharp focus. Suddenly he was reaching for his blaster, already had it out when Obi-Wan's wrath met the weapon head-on, cleaving through the weapon with brutal strength. It didn't  _need_ strength, of course: the energy weapon sliced through concrete and durasteel as if it were the most delicate silk. It knew no opposition and needed no muscle to do its work. But he jerked the weapon up with all the might of the Force, ripping through the weapon before turning back in its fury on the now-disarmed wielder.

Reacting as quickly as a seasoned smuggler could, Ponda Baba jerked in to haul his friend out of the way. Protectively, he threw his arm over the scarred man, but the plunging blade would not be denied. It ripped through the jacket's hidden armour, through the smuggler's massive arm, into the little man's chest, burning through his innards as it put him down. He tumbled to the floor in a heap of wailing flesh, carrying his companion's severed arm all the way to the ground with him.

 _Yes_ , said the Dark Side.  _Teach them a lesson. Show them_.

Ben froze in horror. All eyes were on him now, as he stood in the centre of the bar with a shimmering Jedi weapon. Chills washed over him as he looked down at his handiwork, at the terrible carnage his blade had wrought with near-perfect efficiency. The severed arm at his feet was not a clean  _cho mok_ , a surgical and precise severance of a limb that would heal cleanly and take a prosthetic well. No, he had felt the Dark Side guide him as he struck, felt the subtle cold strength with which he had pulled at the grisly wound, bursting the intricate web of veins with his mind even as the saber sealed them. The blade had not burned it shut cleanly, as it should have; the floor was covered in blood, and the cowering Aqualish thug was still losing his lifeblood, rivulets streaming down the mangled stump as he scurried away.

A healthy opponent could survive a  _cho mok_  easily enough, if he survived the shock. Ponda Baba would not survive this brutal blow on his own. The wound would kill, and kill slowly, without extraordinary medicine. Such was the power of the Dark Side.

All his subterfuge, the delicate dance of smugglers' intrigue, was undone. Guile was worth nothing, now. Word would get to the Empire instantly that the last Jedi had been here. All the Emperor's wrath would rain down on him, and in that moment he stood ready to challenge it. Then, disgusted with himself most of all, Ben powered down the saber and stepped over the severed arm to the boy. The smugglers, intuiting the seriousness of what had just happened, affected an air of disinterest. They went back to their drinks. The band picked up. Everyone who was not rushing to alert the Empire took great pains to distance themselves from the private dispute. And the Wookiee, smiling gently, was looking down over his shoulder, impressed by Ben's warrior brutality in a way the old man had not intended.

Ben hoisted Luke gently to his feet, burying his sorrow deep as he returned to the business that was now even more urgently at hand. "Chewbacca here," he said, "is first mate on a ship that might suit us."

With the affected confidence of an old bar brawler not to be trifled with, Ben made his way to the table in the shadows. Inside, beneath the sand-caked robes, he was trembling as an awakened rage licked at the edges of his calm and threatened to undo him.


	11. Sensitive Discussions

 

"And now, your Highness, we will discuss the location of your hidden rebel base."

The floating droid, an IT-O Interrogator, was a relic from Wilhuff Tarkin's personal collection. Private ownership of the Security Bureau's most effective espionage devices was not, strictly speaking, legal—not even for the highest officers of the Empire. But Tarkin's sheer effectiveness had earned him certain privileges. It was the Emperor's design, no doubt, that the Grand Moff should own the droid—and that Vader, fresh from his twin failures at Scarif and Tatooine, should have to humble himself to ask for it. The Death Star itself might have been—should have been—his to command. But with each of these subtle slights, the Emperor handed more and more executive power to the Grand Moff.

She cried out as the needle went in, but her strength faded quickly. Vader waited impatiently as the toxins took effect. Truly, he did not resent the busywork of the battle station being taken out of his hands. He had thought for too long like a military man, in terms of capital ships, manoeuvres, naval strategy. Now his brush with Obi-Wan occupied his every thought; always his mind returned to the Force, and he grew increasingly short-tempered with those who questioned his business with it.

Even now, he was sure he could sense the stink of Obi-Wan's influence on her. He had missed it, somehow, over Tatooine where he was distracted and his grip on the Dark Side was weak. But here, even he could not deny that the young woman's strength in the Force was very pronounced indeed. She had nakedly resisted his attempts to probe her with the Force alone—something even seasoned Jedi had failed to do—and even now, wailing in cries of steadily rising horror, there was an inner serenity to her, a peace and patience that could not be breached. He felt Kenobi's presence keenly in her—wondered, even, if the old master had trained her to resist these interrogations so well. But he would know soon enough.

The truth serum took effect, as intended, nearly an hour before the torture toxins did. With all the menace tuned out of his mechanical voice, with all the guile and craft he could muster, he reached out as a friend to the troubled princess, whispered of escape, promised to return her to the Alliance.

"Help us, Leia," he probed. "What happened to those tapes?"

"I can't," she moaned.

"You must. It's your duty. Your obligation to Alderaan and to your father. Your father commands you to tell us."

She whimpered helplessly at his mechanical feet, but did not give in.

With gentle words, probing her fears of failure, her sense of duty, the doubts he felt she had about her family, Vader coaxed what information he could from her. But she had found in herself some kind of centre, something to hold to even as the room swam and the drugs coursed through her mind. Her mental resistance was uncanny, and Vader was exhausted. After a hellish two days of failure and embarrassment, his rage took him and he could no longer deceive her. As the torture toxins began to take hold, he shifted his focus, turning the frustrations of his last two cycles into a weapon of torment.

"You are now in great pain," he barked. "Your world is nothing but pain!"  
"No," she wailed, brought back to herself by the sudden agony as the suggestion took hold. As the hour grew desperate, Vader turned to the power that was  _not_  denied to him, the power of the Dark Side, and focused his own agony on her like a spear.

"Where are the plans?!"

"I can't tell!" she screamed. Even forming the words was a struggle.

The toxins would break most prisoners with simple suggestions; now, in his mind's eye, he conjured the most horrific agonies he could muster. Far beyond even his near-constant feeling of suffocation, the terror he projected onto others when he gripped them by the throat, there was a worse fear, a worse pain. It was a place Vader was afraid to go. But frustrated, afraid beyond all else of failing the Emperor, he opened himself to it.

"Your skin is afire!" he suggested, and suddenly it was. But so was his own, as he reached back into a memory of terror even he still could not face fully. "You're burning! Your nerve endings are in flames! Your flesh is being torn apart!"

"Please!" she begged him. He could feel her suffering so closely, so keenly. It was his own suffering. Anakin's suffering.

"Where are the Death Star plans?" he shouted. "Where is the Rebel fortress?" Beneath the distorting speaker of his mechanical voice, the hollow rasp of his furious shout whistled softly in his burned throat. His flesh, too, was burning. He called up the pain from places he had buried it. She was sensitive, he knew. It would only magnify her suffering. And she was a girl unused to agony. Agony was all he had known. He would outlast her.

How long they remained like that, locked in excruciating torment, he could not say. He reeled from his own broken memories, nearly drowned now in madness, betrayal, hatred. For with his memories of that fire, of the magma that consumed him—no, consumed Anakin, he reminded himself—came deeper hurts. The betrayal of his closest friend, his last friend. The betrayal of the woman he loved—

Vader came back to himself just in time. Lost in his haze, in that terrible moment, he had gone somewhere altogether different. He felt, for the first time in nearly twenty years, the reckless power of a Force choke delivered from hot rage rather than cold cruelty. As he fought to return to himself, he found Leia off the bench, her tongue lolling weirdly to one side as he crushed the life from her throat with his mind. The sounds she made in the throes of death were nearly the same as Padmé's—and to his surprise, they horrified him.

"Stop!" he ordered, as much to himself as to her. With all the strength that remained to him, he pushed the darkness from his mind, pushed the horrifying memories back into the mechanical hole whence he had drawn them. He relaxed his hold on the Force and the Princess tumbled in a heap to the durasteel slab, barely breathing.

"You are no longer dying," he ordered, nearly begging her. "No longer in pain." After a tense moment, forced to life only by the suggestive power of the toxins, her body took a ragged breath. Then another. She looked so much like… no…

The cell door slid open behind him. He had exhausted their time. It must have been hours, in the end. Her breathing steadied.

"Your mind is a blank," he said. "You float without a thought or concern."

"Lord Vader, is anything wrong?"

His reverie broken, he turned to the officer in a fury.

"No!" he roared. "Get out!" The officer, unused to hearing Vader himself on the edge of losing control, was only too quick to comply. Vader had to call after him.

"Wait," said the Dark Lord. He fought to bring his mind back.

The officer turned expectantly. Inwardly, he shook with the same fear as all the others.

"Have a medical tech see to the prisoner," he said. "Make sure she's suffered no serious damage."

At Vader's compassion, the officer looked as confused as Vader felt.

"Have her fortified so she can take another round of interrogation," he finished, as if to justify his compassion with cruelty.

"Yes, Lord Vader."

He did not know if he could endure another round himself.


	12. A Slight Detour

 

"I don't feel safe anymore," said Padmé. The heavy concern in her face was starkly visible to an old man, but well-hidden from an arrogant young one.

Obi-Wan Kenobi smiled wryly. "That is a common reaction," he said, "to one assassination attempt after another."

The closer Ben came to the netherworld of the Force—and there was no denying its closeness, now—the more powerful he became in dream, and the more his visions obeyed the command of his spirit. Still trapped in his desert-blasted body, still fighting the ravages of the sickness that would claim him, there was little he could do in these dreams. His spirit was still chained to his body, and he could go only forward and backward to where he had been. Qui-Gon spoke of the immense freedom of the netherworld of the Force, of leaping and bounding through the threads of space and time like current through wires, like a ship of unparalleled speed racing through a hyperspace lane, surging past and beyond a thousand light-years of blackness in the space of an hour.

For now, he was content in these moments to follow the threads of his life, and to let the seas of dream renew him in spirit. Dark things had come to trouble him; but always in the Force there was an inexhaustible fountain of light. He stretched out toward his happy memories, let them heal the black rupture in his spirit that had broken open in the cantina.

"Through the Force," said Master Yoda to someone, "things you will see. Other places. The future…the past. Old friends long gone."

But were those words themselves the past? No—they were from the  _future,_ he sensed. A possible future, at least. That meant Yoda had survived, somehow. That brought him comfort, too.

Ben was an old man, but he was still young to the boundless tapestry of the Force. It was all so vast, even to a Jedi master. With calm, he centered himself on those words, let them shape his thoughts.

"Old friends long gone."

Across time and space, he pulled away from Yoda's voice, from the blurred image of a mysterious swamp world, teeming with life. He returned in an instant to the round blue room on Coruscant where he had frequently traveled in his recent meditations. He arrived disoriented, still reeling from the vastness of the Force, and heard her speak again.

"I don't feel safe anymore," said Padmé. Obi-Wan's dismissive smile brought her only a little ease and comfort. Ben was sick to see it.

"That is a common reaction," said young Obi-Wan, "to one assassination attempt after another. Your continued work seems to be having an effect, then. You've become quite popular with the wrong sort of crowd." His flippancy was off-putting. But Ben remembered his own arrogance, his false humility. He could not have known, as that young man, what it really meant to feel unsafe. He sympathized with her fears, he remembered. But a young master in the bloom of his strength did not feel her fragility, could never fully understand it.

He understood now, and it hurt him sorely.

"Obi…it's not the Separatists," she said. "It's…it's Anakin."

Even as a young man, that unsettled Obi-Wan.

"You're right to be concerned," he said. "He's very strong, but he's become reckless. Impatient."

"There's some darkness in him," she said.

"I haven't felt it," said Obi-Wan. Ben could see, now, the weight of Palpatine's strength upon him—upon all of the Jedi. Looking back with the eyes of a master, he could now perceive the fog drawn over his own senses. It was the same fog that had driven Dooku away. The fog that had laid the Jedi low.

"I haven't felt anything," said Padmé. "But I've… seen it with my own eyes. He's troubled."

"That he is," said Obi-Wan. "We have discussed this matter. I thought it as well to let it go, but…"

"Me?" asked Padmé. "I'm 'this matter'?"

Obi-Wan sat beside her. There was such gentleness in his voice. "As you well know," he said, "I'm in no position to lecture him. Not after…"

"That…wasn't your fault," said Padmé. A darker vision, a darker place, threatened to pull Ben's dream backward, to another world and another pain nearly as deep. He held to the light that was here, resisted it.

"I know that," said Obi-Wan. "Most days I believe it. But if I could teach Anakin one thing…there is such a thing as too much patience."

Ben bristled, now, at those words.

"He's so young," she said. "In many ways he's still a boy. Too much patience is not his problem, believe me."

Obi-Wan laughed, but his smile was sad. "It was my problem," he said.

Padmé crossed to the balcony. Even in the dark of night, the light-bloom of a thousand passing ships cast a constant, shimmering glow across the tiled floor where she walked.

"The Duchess," she said. "Did—did you love her?"

"Yes," said Ben in his mind.

"Yes," said Obi-Wan, too, without hesitation.

"How did you do it?" Padmé asked. There was sadness and fear in her voice. "What is love without attachment? When you care for someone that much—how do you let go?"

Obi-Wan thought back to his training, thought back the number of times Qui-Gon had broken with tradition—then the number of times he had broken with Qui-Gon in turn.

"People see the Jedi as warriors," he began, "but that is not what we are. It is only one point of view. We begin our training—"

"Every time you take him away on another mission," she interrupted, "I fear the worst. He's so young, Obi-Wan. I fear one day he'll just never come home. I don't want to be afraid anymore. How do you learn to let go, when you love someone so completely?"

Obi-Wan's smile was sad even then. But there was so much naïveté behind it. He laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. She was warm to the touch, even through the ages.

"The Force binds us all together," he said. "Every one of us. All who live, and all who have gone before us. You never 'lose' anything, when it comes down to it. In the end, Padmé, you can only smile in perfect serenity, and know that for a moment, you were here, in this form, and what you love most in all the Force came to your side. It became so manifest that for a moment, you could reach out and touch it. When that is gone—when even you are gone, as such—you have that for eternity. A memory preserved forever in light itself."

The tears welled in her wide brown eyes. It was still so hard for her. And soon, Ben knew, it was going to get harder.

"And beside all that," young Obi-Wan admitted with a sigh, "we never do let go. Not completely."

Padmé nodded. "Good," she said. "When I am gone…I should like you to remember me."

"On that account there is no danger," Obi-Wan said.

 _Don't say it_.

"And besides…your troubles are many, but you need not worry about that."

_Don't say it, you foolish boy._

"Anakin and I will always protect you. I promise."

_WHOMP!_

The  _Falcon_  slammed roughly against the artificial wall of an interdiction field, shuddering as the hyperspace tunnel around it tore itself apart and the ship collapsed back into realspace. Howling alarms were drowned out only by the howl of the Wookiee as Ben was jostled awake hard in his makeshift bunk.

 _Anakin and I will always protect you_.

He was slow to come back. The pilot, Han, was already bounding down the corridor to the cockpit.

"I see them," he barked. "Rout everything we got to forward shields, but don't hit it till I tell you. I'll make the calculations for a second jump."

Ben lifted his body from the bed with some difficulty. From the cockpit, he heard Luke's astonishment.

"What's going on? How did they find us?" he asked.

"These are interdictors, kid," said the pilot. "Looks like some kind of blockade on the Corellian Run. I've never seen security like this so far out."

" _GWARRRRRRFFF_ ," said the Wookiee, just as Ben made his way down to the cockpit.

"There!" said Han, jabbing an anxious finger toward a display. "That's our window. Bring us right down to speed with the others, and strap in."

Ben looked out on the Imperial blockade, a backlog of freighter traffic and passenger liners all hauled out of their hyperspace journeys at great expense. Four Interdictor cruisers some distance off hung in eerie silence, their bulging grav projectors arranged to throw a vast net across a swath of common space.

"You really think you can bluff your way through an Imperial blockade?" asked Ben.

Han shot him a glare; but it was a fair question.

" _My_  way through?" the smuggler said, jerking a thumb into his chest. "Absolutely. But the rest of you? Thanks to all the commotion around our little exit from Mos Eisley, they're going to be looking for us."

"And we're just lining up for a sensor scan?" Luke said, incredulous.

"The saving grace of Imperial bureaucracy," said Han. "Lineups. We've got the navicomputer working out a second jump, a slight detour off the beaten track. It's complicated to make the jump this close to their grav generators. We'll have to break and get clear. But they don't know hard we can kick."

"It won't matter if those interdictors lock on," said Ben.

"See that little spot of space between them?" Han said. "We're going through there. We'll make the jump on the far side."

"No way," Luke breathed. Even Ben's mouth drew tight.

"They can't lock onto us back there without letting their net down. If they're under orders to keep up that roadblock, they'll think twice before they shut it down to latch onto us."

Chewbacca barked something doubtful.

"I  _know_  it's probably for us," Han said. " _They're_  not going to figure that out till they identify us."

A comms indicator lit up on the cockpit control panel and a voice crackled across the standard frequency.

"Commercial YT, light cargo," the voice said. "Please divert to tractor lane Besh for inspection."

"What was that?" Luke asked.

"They identified us," Han said with a laconic wave of his hand. "Everybody keep quiet. Uh, Negative, negative, Corellian Run blockade. This is not a commercial vessel."

"We know that," crackled the voice. "Divert to tractor lane Besh immediately."

"Chewie, get ready," Han said, sliding control of the freighter to the Wookiee as he stalled for time. "Uh, negative, blockade. Repeat, this is not a commercial flight. This is a smuggling vessel—"

"What are you doing?!" Luke blurted out. Han silenced him with a glare and a sharply raised finger.

"We know that," said the voice.

"This is a smuggling vessel out of, uh, looks like Mos Eisley," Han said, furiously punching information into the navicomputer. "We caught them on the edge of the Nelvaan system, trying to cross into Chommel sector. We're uh, bound for Imperial Impound in the Core. Top priority."

Chewbacca barked something skeptical. Han's eyes were wide with concern.

"Well, it might, if they're important enough." He glared at the old man and the boy crowding anxiously over his shoulder. "I'm starting to think they're important enough."

The radio was silent for a long, tense moment. The navicomputer let out a friendly beep as its jump lights clicked over to green.

"Amazing," said Luke. "I didn't think a nav could—"

The ship shuddered as a tractor beam took hold. One of the interdictors had moved out of formation and had locked on. Han's eyes darted across the sensors as he ran some calculations.

"YT light cargo," crackled the voice. "Please transmit your priority code now. You have thirty seconds to comply before we neutralize."

"Priority code," Han muttered. "Priority code. Damn. All right, Chewie, rout everything to the thrusters. Auxiliary power too."

"Grrahhhrarrr," the Wookiee warned.

"I know it means no shields," he said. "This is a capital ship. We need everything we got to break a tractor beam this strong."

"Rrrrowf," the Wookie barked, pointing.

Han leaned forward, counted the turbolaser batteries. "Yeah, well, let's hope they're a real bad shot. Buckle up, kid; it looks like we're doing this the hard—"

He felt a gentle hand on his shoulder. He didn't like the way it calmed him. The old man leaned over to Han's ear.

"Tell them this impound was personally requested by Darth Vader over Tatooine," he said softly.

Han's eyes went wide. "You sure?"

" _Gworf_ ," Chewbacca said, twisting his head.

Ben nodded. "Tell them."

Han shook his head as if it were the wildest thing he had ever heard, then clicked the comms over just the same. "Look, uh, command? This impound was personally requested by Darth Vader. He, uh, he wants this ship immediately. He said so over Tatooine. Right this second." Han's nerves were buzzing. They'd never let him through now that the fear was slipping into his voice.

"YT, stand by," crackled the comms. In the pregnant silence, Han scoffed under his breath. "Aw, this is nuts," he spat.

Chewbacca barked a question at him.

"Just rumours, really," said Han. "Rogue Imperial. No home sector, no rank, no number. A ghost story told by the cartels, some kinda smuggler boogeyman. There's no way in hell they're going to—"

The tractor beam shut down. Han's stomach lurched in momentary weightlessness as the ship's little gravity generators fought to adjust.

"YT light cargo, priority impound," the voice came back. "Please proceed through the interdictor net to Priority Lane One and recalculate your jump. This blockade is a secret operation. Please disavow all knowledge of this blockade in the Core."

Han let out his breath. Chewbacca yipped happily.

"I don't believe it!" said Luke.

Han's blood ran cold as he looked to the satisfied old man, then back to the controls. "All right," he said. "Keep everything on sublight thrusters. I'm going to take us halfway in, then make a run for the jump point."

Chewbacca nodded and routed the power as directed. Han took the helm and wheeled the  _Falcon_ over and down towards the first coordinates of their very off-the-legal-grid new course.

"You've bought us one shot, old man," he breathed, knuckles white on the controls. "One shot."

Everyone in the cockpit was motionless as they sped towards, then past, then away from the Imperial priority lane towards the narrow space between the interdictors. The comms crackled once or twice hesitantly, as if the receiving officer were afraid now to question their unusual flight pattern.

"Steady," Han said, sailing towards the gap. He knew exactly when the proximity alarms would trigger; tired of being told how many things he was about to hit, he shut them up with an aftermarket kill switch as they buzzed within two or three dozen feet of the interdictor's command deck. Then he was through, but still holding his breath.

"Priority impound," the voice crackled at last. "You're now in forbidden space. Please stand by for—"

"All right,  _punch it!_ "

Chewie's massive paw, straddling both the hyperdrive and the auxiliary power controls, yanked back hard on both, and the cabin lights dimmed for a moment as the ship shuddered and lurched against the refocusing interdictor grid, tearing free of it an instant before it could fully lock on. Even in the stress of the moment, Han revelled in the eerie feeling of freedom as the little ship passed from common space into a tunnel of unspeakably bright energy. He felt the galaxy fall away behind him with exhilaration, felt the freedom and peace of passing into a place without suffering, without beings in pain, and savoured it the only way he knew how: as a simple man who liked going fast.

"This is point five, gentlemen," he said, swaggering away from the controls with a lopsided smirk. "Don't get used to it. We'll be on Alderaan before you know it."


	13. One Swift Stroke

 

The boardroom sectioned off from the Death Star's command deck was never unstaffed. The computers built into the outer lip of the round presentation table had full access to the Death Star's central network—and through that, phantom access to a hundred thousand Imperial datavaults scattered throughout the galaxy. It was in that regard a strategic as well as a tactical superweapon, capable of far more subtlety and guile than a man like Admiral Motti would ever possess.

From the far side of the table, Grand Moff Willhuff Tarkin watched with quiet amusement as the admiral rubbed nervously at the skin of his neck, clearing his throat as if by habit. Obsessively proud of the station's technical specifications, he was browsing the schematics of the superlaser now, as if fixating on the size of the weapon under his command brought him an unsettling amount of comfort.

Tarkin paid him no mind at first, glancing up only casually from his work. The IT-O Interrogator had provided him with a wealth of medical data to cross-reference, but he did not want to appear too curious, even in front of Motti. Vader had his eye on Motti now, and anything that Motti could discern, Vader would soon know, too.

"There are aides to do that work," Motti offered, "whatever it is. Men of our stature need not concern themselves with—"

"I warned you," said Tarkin with cold detachment. "I told you Lord Vader is no one to be trifled with."

Motti tugged at his neck. "What  _was_  that?" he asked.

"You could ask him, I suppose," said Tarkin. "But if I were you, I'd consider myself lucky, and conduct my business from a safe distance for a while." He thumbed lazily through an endless string of genetic data.

"I shall not save you again," he warned.

Motti fumed. "I will not sit idly by while the Emperor's attack dog undermines the supremacy of this battle station," he said. "I remain the commanding admiral of the Death Star. I am a destroyer of worlds, Tarkin. Let him crush the Rebellion one neck at a time if it pleases him, by whatever trickery he likes."

"Lord Vader's power is one of the great mysteries of the galaxy," said Tarkin laconically. "Much like the love my wife bears for your family. But neither is a thing you should dare to test a second time." He smiled softly as the display beneath the table lit up a cool blue. "Besides which, he does have his practical limitations."

Motti leaned forward. "Such as?"

Tarkin waved him away. "If overthrowing him is your plan, Admiral, our conversation is over. I shan't preside over your squabbles, save to advise you I would not want to be remembered to Imperial Centre as the man who broke the Emperor's favourite toy." He paused, as if gauging his own chances. "Or was broken by it, perhaps," he finished.

"But you said—"

"That is not what I meant by limitations," said Tarkin. "He is a tool of brute force. You cannot hope to contend with him. And yet in his single-mindedness he can overlook the most obvious tools."

Motti frowned. In his cold heart, Tarkin knew he ought to speak no further. But his arrogance cried out for an underling to boast to, and Motti, having nearly been strangled to death by the Dark Lord, was likely to avoid him at all costs until the Emperor recalled his chief agent for another secret errand.

"Take the princess, for instance," he said. "She is invaluable to us. I have long suspected her as a sympathizer for the Rebellion. But her unexpected presence at the battle of Scarif suggests she might occupy a far more central role than I had anticipated. She is our strongest link to finding their hidden fortress—yet Vader himself was unable to procure its location from her."

"There are other ways," Motti said, though Tarkin disregarded him.

"Perhaps," he said. "Obliterating the Rebels with this station is a straightforward solution. You and Lord Vader have that in common. But if we cannot find the base, there are yet other small victories we might yet win."

"There are other ways to get her talking," Motti said. Tarkin ignored him; it was unlikely he could think of anything the Dark Lord had not tried.

"Perhaps," said Tarkin again. "But in any case, she must not die. She is royalty, after all—a princess and ambassador from one of the most ancient and respected noble families in the Empire. She is young, well-spoken, possessed of extraordinary leadership qualities, and I have no doubt now that she is the future of the Rebellion, if we allow the Rebellion to have a future."

"She has a future only if we allow it," said Motti, but Tarkin shook his head.

"If we terminate her now, she becomes a martyr," said Tarkin. "A saint for the cause. The little girl who escaped the fleet, who made a fool of Darth Vader as she delivered Imperial secrets directly under his nose. No, I think not."

"What would you have us do?"

Tarkin tapped his screen with delight. "Here is where Lord Vader's tactics end and mine begin," he said. "The interrogation has proven ineffective, but it was far from fruitless. You forget that an IT-O Interrogator is built on a medical droid's chassis. In Vader's hands it is an effective torture device; but it is first and foremost a medical tool."

"The interrogation brought us  _nothing_ ," Motti said, frustrated.

"Correct," said Tarkin. "And even that is something. Vader's interrogations have never before been successfully resisted, did you know that? His track record was perfect until today. Those 'sorcerer's ways' you see fit to mock have never failed us before. And that, in itself, tells us something very useful indeed."

Motti raised an eyebrow. "Such as?"

Tarkin tapped the monitor excitedly. "You are not old enough to remember how the Jedi recruited for their ancient cult—seizing children from their beds in the night, tearing infants from the arms of their mothers who showed even the slightest inclination toward their mystic practice. It all stopped during the Purge, when the Emperor wiped them out and destroyed nearly all of the Jedi records. The children born that year were not monitored by the Jedi, nor by the Emperor. I thought I might find something in her scan to indicate such an unfortunate."

"And did you?"

Tarkin shook his head. "In truth, I don't know what to look for, which makes hunches very hard to prove. But In the analysis, I've discovered something even more remarkable."

"Tell me."

Tarkin smiled. "I've compared her scans to the medical records of her family—and it seems that Princess Organa is neither a true princess, nor a true Organa."

"So who is she?" asked Motti.

"It doesn't matter," said Tarkin. "Perhaps one of these Force Children, born during the Purge—she's the right age for it, precisely. I can only presume that when word of the Jedi's atrocities spread, some fawning parents parted with their little girl before they could find her. It explains her unusual resistance to Lord Vader's methods, and it further gives us political ammunition on a homeworld whose monarchy is still at least nominally hereditary."

"Wait," said Motti. "You think she's a Jedi?"

"There are no Jedi," said Tarkin. "Their ancient house is sundered and their religion crushed; Lord Vader has seen to that. But a princess who stands as the symbol of hope for her people needs no lightsaber to be dangerous. She needs only the wealth of her birthright, the prominence of a trusted family name, and the unbroken virtue of an innocent martyr. But if she is not the trueborn daughter of Breha and Bail Organa, her influence will fade, a succession crisis will no doubt follow, those we install as the true heirs can be persuaded to shed their embarrassing pacifism, and in the months and years to come we shall utterly destroy Alderaan's usefulness to the Rebellion as a stable, untarnished jewel of its recruitment agenda. In the resulting civil war, we shall back a monarch loyal to the Empire and be done with its sympathizers once and for all."

"It all seems pointlessly complex to me," said Motti. "I'm a military man. I'm no politician."

"Neither is Lord Vader," the Grand Moff gloated. "In that, too, you are alike. But I have long specialized in turning failures into triumphs. Let her resist Vader's mind probing as she pleases, for now. We will find the Rebel base soon enough. There is much we can do with her in the meantime, whether Vader breaks her or not."

"What will you do?" Motti asked.

Tarkin smiled "Lord Vader, I have heard, remains the Emperor's prized wolf for hunting down the Jedi and all who show an affinity for their unnatural sorceries. He travels, I am told, with one of the last archival records of the old Force-sensitive bloodlines. I will petition the Emperor for access to those files, then seek out a positive match. When I can prove that the supposed golden daughter of Alderaan is the claimless bastard child of some sorcerous cultist bloodline, it will fracture the faith of the people, erode Alderaan's prominence, and put an end to its treacherous royal family."

"Then I'm definitely no politician," Motti admitted. "We're sailing through uncontested core space aboard the greatest superweapon ever built. If it were up to me, I'd take this weapon straight to Alderaan and destroy it. To hell with the mind games and machinations, Governor. None of this 'single ignition' posturing. Just fully charge the weapon and show the Rebellion what true power really is."

Tarkin smiled—dismissively, at first. But he knitted his fingers, then furrowed his brow, then cocked his head. His thin smile faded briefly, then returned in force.

"What?" Motti asked.

Taking care to scrub his data terminal, Tarkin stood and moved toward the door.

"Go on," said Motti. "Go on and laugh. Tell me why it won't work. But that's what I'd do, just the same."

"You are a wiser man than I gave you credit for," said Tarkin. " Get some rest. You'll want to be awake in a few standard hours."

He struck the comm switch as he walked past his own seat at the table—he had been using Yularen's terminal for his research, to remove all suspicion that he was circumventing Vader's nominal control of the prisoner.

The comm speaker crackled. "Sir?"

"Send a message to Lord Vader," he said. "Tell him I await his presence in the command room when he is done with the prisoner. And calculate a course for Alderaan."

"Yes, sir."

"And contact Imperial Center. I require top access to all Core records at the Emperor's convenience."

Motti had no interest in waiting around for Vader's return, but paused in the doorway.

"What are you planning?" he asked.

"An elegant solution," said Tarkin. "I think you shall be quite pleased."


	14. Difficult to See

 

Sight in the Force was the essential heart of Soresu. Those disciplined in its ways were uncommonly gifted when it came to premonition, and the more certain an outcome was, the easier it was to foresee. Ben had long ago mastered the art of predicting blaster fire, of angling his lightsaber precisely to return it to its origins. Even how, saving his strength in dreamlike half-sleep, he knew that was the first lesson he would teach Luke. It was out of order, perhaps; but it had taken his entire life to see one of the final lessons Yoda had taught him: a lightsaber was a light first, and a saber second. It hummed not only with a cutting edge, but with the resonance of the Force itself. It was more wand than weapon, he reminded himself again, in the hands of the wise.

Ben was lying down again, conserving his strength, as soon as the danger of the Imperial blockade was past. He could not say if he was sleeping, if he was dreaming, or if the Living Force had carried him far away to another time, another place. The  _Millennium Falcon_  was every bit as fast as its captain had boasted—faster, maybe—but it had come at a cost. The ship stank of stellar-grade coolant, and the effort of lugging against the tractor beams had burned something out that stank of melted plasteel. The ship was a safety nightmare, and reminded him of the podracers he had seen cheating death atop Ben's Mesa, twenty years before. The Mesa, a sprawling desert plateau not far from Mos Espa, was named for Ben Neluenf, the legendary podracer from whom Ben had stolen his new name.

Ben Neluenf? Why not Ben Kenobi? It was a common name, a nobody's name, but also the name of a local hero. It had brought him acceptance early on.

 _Obi-Wan_ …

"Ben Kenobi," he insisted, though he did not know if he said it aloud. A fever took him away, though the Force directed his fall.

The leaking coolant of the  _Falcon_  was the same sort that sprayed from the damaged pipes in the Galactic Senate, a suspension of heat-sinking fluids that carried the unbearable warmth of the smog-choked core world to energy plants far from the Senate and the Temple. The slightest scent of it carried him back to the choking air that greeted him nineteen years earlier as he stepped onto the Jedi Temple's skybridge for nearly the last time.

The distress call had come out long hours ago, when the assault was still in its early stages. Caught by surprise, the defenders of Coruscant had held out for a time, but were overwhelmed in the end. Racing back to the Temple, Obi-Wan and Anakin met an all-out invasion already in progress: the Senate itself was breached by the Separatist forces and whole swaths of its grandeur lay in ruins. They had been separated in the fighting, but would find each other again soon enough. Anakin could take care of himself. He was not Obi-Wan's concern—not now.

With long, racing strides aided by the Force, he charged along the upper level of the skybridge connecting the Jedi Temple to the Senate. At first, he had deeply resented the construction of the skybridge: Ben remembered more clearly in his old age, now that Palpatine's veil was lifted, the installation of the direct conduit. It was the sort of thing Dooku had despised, the encroachment of political and military command on the monastic isolation of the Temple; he remembered many times as a boy hearing the old Master railing against the militarization of the Jedi and the corruption of their purity. In his own way, Dooku had been right where Yoda was wrong: such things were a truly rare occasion, and that made his fall all the harder to bear.

With the skybridge came greater traffic from the Senate as officials and advisors came and went at all hours of the day and night. The relationship of the Temple to the Senate was changing; that was unavoidable. No one in those days had imagined the Order's very existence was in jeopardy, but many were unhappy with the shape it was taking; these Jedi most of all made regular contact with the Senators and politicians in an attempt to influence that shape and preserve the Order's independence and integrity as peacekeepers. They came at all hours of the day and night, if the standard clock could even be so divided: the planet was an ecumenopolis, a massive sprawling global city; choked under clouds and mesospheric haze, lit by an incessant blanket of synthetic light, Coruscant was a realm of perpetual twilight, trapped forever halfway between day and night, between light and dark.

At least, that was how it been every day but this one. Smoke stained the elegant windows and billowed in great roiling clouds outside. Here, on the topmost level, things were bad enough; down below, where the bridge led straight to the Senators' chambers, the power had gone out in the fighting and the way was dark as night.

Obi-Wan switched on his lightsaber, held it behind his eyes like a beacon. He hesitated only once on the ramp as it descended into shadow. Then, gritting his teeth, gripping his weapon in hand, he started down the dark path.

His comm crackled as he reached the Senators' floor. Only the private frequency of the Order remained active.

"They've breached the top level," someone shouted. It was Shaak Ti, he thought. "We need reinforcements."

He was about to respond when he heard Anakin's voice.

"We're here," the younger man said, with all too much eagerness in his voice. "Looks like we got back just in time."

Obi-Wan reacted nearly too late as the blaster fire came in. The battle-droids had no real anger, no living hostility behind their attack protocols. That made their ambushes much harder to predict than those of living opponents, which were always preceded by a ripple of murderous intent. But he was fast in those days, unspeakably fast, and his blade snapped up to deflect a flurry of blaster fire almost before he perceived the threat.

The droids in the front line, the first around the corner, fell to their own own blaster bolts, and with methodical precision sharpened by a growing sense of urgency, he set about carving through the rest. They stood their ground, as they were programmed to do. They could not feel the touch of darkness in him as he came.

"The Chancellor's chambers," Shaak Ti directed through the comm. "Hurry." She was only a few floors above him. For a moment, in the hall, Obi-Wan hesitated.

"On my way," said Anakin's voice. Obi-Wan stood, looked down the hall, then to the elevator, then back down the hall again. Was it Dooku? Anakin could not yet face him alone—

"It's Grievous," said Shaak Ti. "Grievous himself. We can't stay here. We're going to try to get the Chancellor to one of the hangar decks."

"Decks twelve and thirteen are out of commission," said Anakin. It was true; they'd just been there. A hail of blaster fire drowned out the comm; no one knew who was in mortal peril until the shooting stopped.

"We're moving him," said Shaak Ti. "No choice. Meet us on the skybridge."

Obi-Wan thumbed the commlink. "Negative," he said. "Repeat, stay off the skybridge. Kenobi here. The power's been cut to the bridge. The elevators will be down."

"We copy, Gener—nobi. Search—or alter—routes."

"Come back?" said Anakin. "I don't copy. There—much interference."

"We're going to tr—angar deck twen—"

"Master, whe—osed to mee—" crackled Anakin's reply. The frequencies faded as the jammers finally caught up to the Jedi commlinks' advanced capabilities.

It would be well enough. Grievous was dangerous and well-trained, but he was no Jedi. The sabers in his hands were not mystical weapons—merely glorified cutting torches. Anakin was a ferocious fighter and Obi-Wan did not think him outmatched, especially with Shaak Ti at his side.

The Chancellor, perhaps, was in trouble—but Obi-Wan had more pressing concerns.

The elegant double doors were locked and sealed when he arrived. There was no time for it; he plunged his lightsaber through the door and slowly began to melt through, hoping the blue glow of its tip would indicate a friend, not a foe. He felt her presence clear as day, knew he had come to the right place at the right time.

"Ani—" she breathed. Padmé's voice was thick with terror.

Obi-Wan stepped through the smoke, over the molten edge of the hole he had cut.

"Padmé," he said. "You're all right."

She was curled behind the long plush meeting-bench, sheltered from the outside glass. Beyond the window, droid fighters zipped and careened through the other towers with clone interceptors in tow. The distant silhouette of Grievous's capital ship, the  _Invisible Hand_ , hung on the top of the horizon.

She ran to him, was in his arms before he knew it. She was wearing the blue dress.

"I knew you'd come," she said. "Where's Anakin? Is he with you?"

Behind Obi-Wan's eyes, old Ben fumed, mouthing the words as his younger self said them.

"We were separated," said Obi-Wan. "It looks like the Chancellor's under attack."

"Then—why are you here, Obi?"

"Grievous has taken you before," Obi-Wan said. "He will not take you again."

"I know," said Padmé. Obi-Wan barely heard those words in his alarm and vigilance. But old Ben heard them—heard their true weight.

"Come with me," he said, and she did not hesitate. "It's not safe here."

"Not anymore," she said, looking at the hole through her door with astonishment.

"It wouldn't have held them," said Obi-Wan. "We've got to get you out of here, into the low streets where it's safe."

"What about Anakin?" she asked.

"Anakin can take care of himself," he reassured her. The truth was, Anakin's first thoughts on landing were for the Supreme Chancellor, as if the latter had called out to him, as if the two had become so close that Anakin could sense the old man's distress. That thought unsettled him. That he had raced after the Chancellor without a thought for his forbidden bride, though—that merely angered him.

Ben felt a sudden pain in that moment. There was no place for anger.

"Come on," Obi-Wan said, extending a hand. She followed him without question. She had a blaster at hand—a sleek little Theed Palace holdout blaster, the only weapon of its clumsy kind he had ever considered truly elegant.

There were probably no blasters like it, now, in all the galaxy. Their elegance, too, was gone forever.

They ran together down darkened halls and followed the working lights (there were very few) to the closest powered elevator. It was, as expected, a trap. Grievous had no doubt expected interference from some formidable fighters now that the Temple and the Senate were linked. Ben heard them before he saw them—heard the eerie hum of their electrostaves lighting up in the elevator. Then the doors were open and a full squad of Grievous's personal Magnagaurd stood between them and safety.

"You will let us pass," said Obi-Wan: it was useless, but he had to try. The six towering droids stepped out of the elevator and fanned around him. Clearly they thought he was going up, toward the Chancellor—not down toward Padmé's freedom. They were not like the other battle-droids: the Magnaguards, IG-100s, were Jedi-killers, designed for the purpose, an unholy alliance of advanced programming and Dooku's personal duelling style. He had not faced so many before—and never as a bodyguard. Even decades later, through distant eyes, Ben felt the Force surge in him.

"Stay close to me," Obi-Wan said softly. In half-sleep, Ben mouthed the words with him.

Then the battle erupted.

The Magnaguards, engineered for murder, were programmed to anticipate a thousand saber duelists' opening lines. Obi-Wan's blazing sword shimmered in the air as it bounced against the fields generated by heir electrostaves, but did not find its mark. He spun and pivoted, and Padmé did her best to match his movements and stay back-to-back with him, dancing within the whirling globe of his lightsaber and taking shots of her own where she could. Reaching out for her mind, he found it, and touched its depths; without thinking, she followed his movements more and more precisely. As the Magnaguards began to coordinate their attacks, linking wirelessly, so did the two humans twine in thought and spirit, united in purpose and movement.

Obi-Wan's shoulder flashed with searing pain, then went numb as the first of the guards hit home. Electricity crackled over his shoulder, spasmed the muscle, left him shivering as the tissue jerked in contrary directions. A wail from behind him told me Padmé was hit as well.

They tried to move to the elevator. The circle tightened.

Ben resisted the urge to shout commands to his younger self. In fact, he wanted to look away.

 _No_ , a voice insisted.  _Stay and watch. Taste your true power again. You'll soon have need of it_.

Every strike slowed him down, left his muscles buzzing and without finesse. It was worse for her. Her legs gave out after the second stray blow got through. The droids were formation-fighting now, passing electricity in long arcs from one staff to the next as they struck blow after blow. Obi-Wan's saber got in the way of most, but not all. The smell of burning flesh began to grow as both took their hits. Obi-Wan straddled her fallen body and tightened his stance, letting them come to him. He was not a natural acrobat, like Anakin. Foolish theatrics would not save her. A flawless defense might.

"Obi," she cried as the electrostaves darted in. "Go, go! Get out of here!  _Ah_!"

Another weapon got through.

"On your own—you can make it—"

He was failing her.

Not her. No. Not her, too.

 _Watch_ , said the Dark Side. Old Ben tried to rouse himself, tried to wake up as if from a nightmare. But he was weary.

An electrostaff struck Padmé hard in the face, but this time left no burn where it bruised her. The crackling lightning at the edge of the staff had snaked up its length to where Obi-Wan gripped it with his free hand. The energy collected there, in his grasp, coiling, magnifying—then it slammed back into the metal of the staff, the arms of the Magnaguard, its vulnerable chest. The droid tugged vainly at the weapon but Obi-Wan did not let go. His saber was too busy deflecting incoming strikes to be much use—but he held onto that electrostaff as the weapon shorted and sparked. The droid convulsed and went down in a hail of crackling energy. Bits of metallic debris from the earlier fighting pinged against its magnetized shell as the unit met its end.

On all sides, the electrostaves came in again. Once again, the lightning that arced from staff to staff now licked hungrily at them. But Obi-Wan felt for it, felt the terrible dark energy cascading around him, and as the droids struck home he called up a pathway through himself to some deep unknown place. As the weapons struck their searing heat raced straight through him, and out of his hands, and back into the droids, arcing through them in a blast of uncontrolled energy. They smoked at the joints, stumbled with their staves, and still the dark energy of their assault poured out of him, magnified by some hidden reserve of inner power. He would spend long years telling himself it was with the last of his strength that he redirected the droids' own attack, tearing them apart with their own lightning. But reliving the attack, cleaving through the droids with a furious, terrible assault as his saber ripped apart their convulsing, blasted bodies, he felt just how deep that well of energy went—just how much power he could have drawn from it at need.

Limitless power, maybe.

 _Oh, certainly. Limitless power_.

The squadron of Magnaguards clattered to the ground in a heap of ruin, their plates still charged and crackling, their edges molten where the saber had finished them. Obi-Wan fell with them, taking a knee beside Padmé's half-conscious body.

"You—you're hurt," she gasped.  
 _More than you know_ , thought old Ben.

"I do believe we've worn out our welcome," said young Obi-Wan smugly. It was a perfectly awful thing to say. Taking her by the hand, he led her to the elevator, and down to the plaza deck, and across the smoking wreck of the Senate Plaza toward a top-secret bolthole in the Old Galactic Market. They ran for a distance under open sky, where the planetary defense forces still tangled with the swooping droid fighters in the monolithic shadow of the  _Invisible Hand_. On the ground, shock troops had been deployed on both sides, and what would later be known as the Battle of Coruscant was already underway.

With light steps and perfect silence, they made their way around craters and rubble left in the Senate Plaza. Old Ben watched them go, for he could not quite get away from himself; he saw now, with an old man's eyes, just how close they came to some of the wandering patrols. But they took flight at twilight and none pursued them: against the backdrop of a smoky, battle-choked sky, the pair moved half in light, half in darkness.

 _Let me wake from this dream_ , Ben willed.  _The boy needs me._

 _There's so much more to revisit_ , said the Dark Side.

 _Let me wake_ , he insisted.

 _You know where we're going_.

"Leia," Ben said. "Leia…"

Aboard the  _Millennium Falcon_ , an old man's lips moved silently as he stirred in his dream. But he did not wake.


	15. Freedom Relics

 

The sandy-haired desert child, the human from Tatooine, stretched out his arms and made a display of his boredom. He still smelt of sand and blood, and below that, the pungent reek of ozone and burnt human flesh. He'd taken a bit of a beating—his first beating, perhaps—and had come through a blaster-fueled massacre just before, or passed very close to one. Perhaps he'd never been to space before, and the wonder of it all was a distraction. But Chewbacca smelled all manner of trauma about him. To bear the weight of it all, and to affect the appearance of boredom at the first few moments of leisure—there was a courage in that. Perhaps he was not as weak as he looked.

Loyal Han Solo, the human of incalculable courage, was in rare spirits. It pleased the old Wookiee to see him so. He was out of danger, now—that was always how he seemed to feel in the freedom after the jump. To Chewbacca, hyperspace was the loneliest place in the galaxy—the loneliest place outside of it, maybe—but it brought Han Solo to such a place of serenity that he knew they would never have roots again, if he could help it.

Chewbacca could live with that. Every time they came out of hyperspace, Han Solo's own species tried to murder him. Again, and again, and again, one pink-skinned monster after another came after him. Han Solo had killed so many of his own kin in self-defence it had become second-nature to him. It was the most heartbreaking thing Chewbacca had ever seen. And yet, one murderous human after another, he courageously made advances on human mates, for as long as they would let him. There'd been a dozen like the female in the Mos Eisley cantina—a dozen who seemed attractive, as far as he could judge such things. And always in a haze of panic and blaster fire, they were driven away to other worlds, other lives.

Han Solo was happy here, and that brought the Wookiee comfort. Han's never-ending war against his own species was the most heartbreaking thing in the world. But it was the nature of humans, he thought, to have broken families—to  _be_ broken families. It was best not to think about it too much.

"How long 'til we get there?" the farm boy asked.

"About six standard hours," Chewbacca said, on the off-chance it mattered.

The boy walked past him as if he were a dumb animal.

"Han, how long?" he asked.

"About six hours, kid," said Han Solo. He darted his eyes to the Wookie. His face was stern, but he thought it was hilarious.

"Funny," Chewbacca snorted, and went to check the damage to the power converters.

As usual, the converters hadn't responded well to the abuses of pulling against tractor beams, of having power rerouted again and again from one ramshackle system to another as courageous Han Solo changed his mind again and again what sort of power he wanted: put everything to this, full power to that. He looked with eager anticipation to the magnificent silver canisters he'd stacked by the alluvial damper. They were Freedom Relics, as the Wookiees referred to all vintage technology produced before the Fall, and it had been immensely kind of Han Solo to cough up the last of their emergency fund for them. The specifications of these converters were off the charts, making them a once-in-a-lifetime steal for a patchwork ship of the  _Falcon_ 's capabilities and demands—but more than that, the converters were a symbol. Freedom Relics were reminders of a time before the enslavement, and it touched him that Han Solo respected that, even if he didn't understand.

"You okay, pal?" said Han Solo.

"I'm fine," Chewbacca snorted.

"Don't take it person—" Han Solo started, but stopped. Nobody this far out from the Wookiee's home sector ever understood him, and he never took offence. "It's something else bothering you, isn't it?"

"Darth Vader is not a story of ghosts," Chewbacca said, his fur bristling. "He is real."

"Ah, Chewie…" Han Solo waved his hand dismissively and looked over the converters himself, equally displeased by their sorry state. "Hey, good call on those replacements."

"He came to Kashyyyk during the Second Battle," said Chewbacca. "The one we lost."

Han Solo stood up so sharply that he almost cracked his tiny human skull on the bulkhead. Chewbacca never lied about the Fall, and loyal Han Solo knew it.

"You're sure?" the smuggler said with concern. "You saw him?"

Chewbacca shook his shaggy head. "He lives in the secret stories," said Chewbacca, though he knew he ought not to speak of them to a human. "He slaughtered a whole village, without a friend at his side."

Han Solo blinked his eyes. "Single-handedly? A whole Wookiee village?"  
Chewbacca nodded.

"So what do we do, then? Drop these two at the nearest station?"

"We do the job," said Chewbacca. "You need that money."

"You're scared," said Han Solo. That scared him, too. He wasn't used to smelling a Wookiee's fear.

"We do the job, Han Solo," Chewbacca repeated. "Darth Vader is real—or he was, fifteen standard years ago. He is real, and he is terrible. That is why the Imperials fear him. But maybe the old sick one was bluffing."

"Could be," said Han Solo, stroking his chin with a little hairless paw. "That old man's a lot cannier than I thought. Just the same…thanks, pal, I'll be careful."

"Those two are a hotter commodity than we expected," Chewbacca warned him.

"Of course they are," Han Solo grumbled. "That's why the take is so good. Nothing we can't handle. Nothing we haven't handled before. But still…stay sharp. There's more to their story than we've been told."

"I sense a danger I cannot see or smell," Chewbacca growled. In the precise, literal language of Shyriiwook, it was the closest thing to a "bad feeling" a person could have.

Han Solo was headed back to the cockpit, turning it all over in his mind, when the young one interrupted again.

"Han," he said. "Are you sure they can't follow us?"

"Not through hyperspace, kid," said Han Solo. "And not through the lanes I chart."

"Well, what if the blockade slowed us down and those Star Destroyers got after us?"

"They're not going to follow us," the smuggler said again.

"Well what if they don't have to follow us? What if somebody on the ground heard where we were going?"

Han Solo rolled his eyes—an expression, for his kind, of exasperation rather than amusement.

"Look, kid, it's not gonna matter. They make for Alderaan, they'll take the trade lanes. It's the long way around, plus there's no ship in the Imperial Fleet that can hit point five." He cocked his customary grin. "Even if they knew the exact docking bay we're headed for, trust me—we'll outrun 'em."

The farm boy nodded, but didn't seem convinced.

"It will be all right, little one," Chewbacca barked at him. "We'll keep you safe." The boy jumped at the sound, backed away uneasily, not understanding.

"Chewie here says to pipe down," warned Han with a smile. The boy nodded and retreated to the passenger lounge, visibly unsettled.

"You are a bad man, Han Solo," said Chewbacca, though as he passed into the hallway he couldn't suppress a barking laugh.

In the bottom bunk of three stacked beds, the old human was breathing uneasily as he slept. He had rested much of the way, and though the room was warmer than stalwart Han Solo liked it, he shivered beneath the blankets. His head-fur was white with age and covered the reptilian bare skin of his face with a regal mane of silver. He was not very old, really—perhaps not even by human standards—but the stench of hidden sickness was just barely perceptible on him. Chewbacca was sniffing at the door of the room when the passenger turned and uttered a single word in his sleep—a strange Basic-sounding word the Wookiee had never heard and did not understand:

"Leia…"

He started awake suddenly in a fit of coughing severe enough to wake him. The Wookie cocked his head to one side, but did not turn away.

"Are you all right?" Chewbacca hooted. The old man found his feet, but not without effort.

"Bad dreams," he said with a shrug, then caught himself. "That's not what you meant. Forgive me, your language is difficult. I used to understand it quite well, but that was long ago."

"You're not well," said the Wookie.

"That is the way of things. We come from the Force, and to the Force we return."

Chewbacca nodded. "You are strong, Young Grandfather. I have never seen a planet so treeless, and the spacers in Mos Eisley say you survived its Great Drought."

Ben shook his head without sadness. "I didn't, you see," he said. "I didn't survive. I simply have—unfinished business."

"Do you have a family?" Chewbacca asked.

The old human nodded. "It's—complicated."

"I have a family," said Chewbacca. "They do not forget you. Some day, I will die far from my family, alone in the stars beside Captain Han Solo. But when we die among the stars, we belong here with all the families who have come before. You come to your freedom, as Wookiees say. There is a celebration in that, more now than ever."  
"That's quite true," said Ben. "There is no death, in the end. Only freedom. Only the Force."

Chewbacca cocked his head. "Do you know what a Freedom Relic is?"

Ben shook his head. "I don't know that word. I certainly can't pronounce it." He tried it, made a sound somewhere between a yawn and a huff that meant nothing at all. Chewbacca laughed in spite of himself.

"Freedom Relics," the Wookiee chuckled, "are old things. Mechanical treasures from before the Fall. Before the Empire enslaved us. Made much better than we know how to make them anymore. A symbol of what greatness we could be, and make, and do—before the dark times. Ships that glisten like mirrors, not dirty and worn. Weapons like mine—and like yours." He pointed to the folds of the Jedi's robe. "From the days when your kind could walk in the open."

Ben looked down. "You know what I am," he said.

Chewbacca waved a hairy paw toward the front of the ship. "I think maybe  _you_  and  _I_  are Freedom Relics," he said. "The others are too young to remember. But we are old enough. I remember, and you remember. The Fall of the Old Republic. The deaths of all those we loved."

_Obi-Wan…there is still good in him…_

"We are indeed old," Ben whispered from behind haunted eyes. "Too old, for this sort of thing." Chewbacca turned away, stunned suddenly by the grief he sensed.

"Most Freedom Relics these days are busted up now," Chewbacca said. "You don't do a mechanic's work without learning that. But they still work better than anything new. Don't forget."

"I won't," said Ben, trying to shake off some hidden darkness.

With a curled finger, Chewbacca pointed at the center of the old man's chest. It was the place where Han always pointed to himself when he was riled up. It was probably where humans thought the seat of their emotions lay, or their spirit, if they had one.

"It's busted up inside," said Chewbacca again. "But it still works better than a new one."

The old man smiled, speechless for a moment.

"We are not just memories, old relics like you and I," said the Wookiee. "We are hopes. Old, stubborn hopes that maybe freedom will come again one day. Old hopes that have refused to die."

A smile cracked the old man's face. "Thank you, my friend," he said, still struggling to parse out the string of hastily barked words. "Kindness is a rare thing out—"

"You owe us money," Chewbacca barked suddenly. "Don't mistake me. I'll help you any way I can, but you're no good to Han Solo if you stop breathing before we get paid."

Ben held his tongue—remembered suddenly how uncomfortable Wookiees were receiving praise or gratitude from strangers. They were not yet intimate enough for thanks by the rules of Wookiee etiquette—and sadly, he knew, they might never be.

"Have no fear," he said. "I've too much do for that."


	16. Moonlight

 

He found her walking in the orchards at sunset, as beautiful under the canopy of a thousand trees from a hundred worlds as the day he met her. The low rumble of a capital ship as it passed overhead shook the boughs and dropped a scattering of gold and silver leaves over his mantle of office as he came down toward the pond.

She was there on the rock where she came to be alone with her worries. It had become a familiar place in recent years. It was serene enough, lying just below the rolling hills, in the shadow of the gleaming white and gold spires of Aldera. But Bail Organa had grown to despise the place of peace: worry enough in a place of peace, he thought, and it became tainted as a place of worry. And his wife was never wrong to worry—and that was worrying in itself.

"Is there room for another?" he said softly, mounting the rock.

"There is no room here for Viceroys," she said. "No room for Senators, and especially none for Generals."

He frowned.

"There is only room for husbands," she said. He sat beside her and she kissed him tenderly.

"And fathers?" asked Bail.

Queen Breha smiled sadly. "Yes," she said. "Fathers too. Especially them."

He sat with her in silence—never at a loss for words, as a statesman, but relieved in the end not to need them.

"Tatooine is a long way out," said Breha. "A very long way."

"I know," said Bail. "About as far from us as a man could get."

"She could be days returning."

"She could be," Bail admitted. "I don't imagine he'll be easy to find. You know, I told so many people he was dead, that by the time Mon Mothma spoke with me, I think I believed it myself."

She touched his hand. "And what do you believe now?"

"A thousand terrible things," he replied. "But I have hope."

"She's too young," said Breha. "I should have gone."

"Nonsense," said Bail. "I'd never have allowed it."  
"I am your queen," she reminded him.

"All the more reason you couldn't go," he said. "The Republic needs this world—your world. It still stands, in spirit, somewhere beneath the Empire, as long as we hold true to our Code."

"The people love you," said Breha. "They would follow you as they follow me."

"Perhaps," said Bail. "But I have…I had certain reasons for sending Leia."

"I will not blame you," she told him. "Already I can see you blame yourself too much."

He hissed softly through his teeth. "I told her to turn straight home when the fighting broke out," he said. "I told her to abort as soon as things exploded over Scarif."

"And did she?" asked Breha.

He shook his head. "You know her better than that. And you know she'd have been back by now."

"Then she went ahead," said Breha. "She took the jump to Tatooine. What do you suppose that means?"

He shrugged. "Either she's got Galen's plans, and now we're in need of a Jedi…or she failed to get them, and now we're in  _real_ need of a Jedi. Most of the fleet's in ruins. I can't hold out much hope either way."

"She was not among the dead," said Breha. "The Jedi will help her."

Bail sighed. "Obi-Wan," he began, but then fell silent.

"It's all right," she said.

"Obi-Wan will protect her," said Bail. "I don't think he wants to be found. But if she finds him—and I have faith in her—he'll have no choice. That's why I had to send her, Breha. That's why it had to be her. He could refuse anyone, but he cannot refuse her. If she can only reach him…the safest place in the galaxy for her would be at his side."

She held Bail close, searched his eyes with a mother's concern.

"Does he know?" she asked.

"Of course he knows," said Bail. "He has to. He's a Jedi. They know everything."

"Not  _everything_ ," said Breha. "They're not mothers, after all." Bail laughed out loud for the first time in what felt like too long.

"Come back to the palace with me," he said. "It gets cool out here after dark."

He took her hand and she stood with grace, lowering herself down off the rock. It was that perfect hour for walking home; the deep red sunset was still with them, and in the darkening sky the tiny grey crescent of a hanging moon brought an ethereal beauty to the evening. As the night came down, the innumerable stars blossomed overhead, and they found their way back to the palace trail by moonlight alone.

"Do you miss him as I do?" she asked, and he nodded. "Obi-Wan, I mean."

"He was a good man," said Bail. "And with a Jedi in the room, you always knew you were safe. You, your family, the whole world."

"She's never even met him," said Breha.

"He'll know her the moment he sees her," said Bail. "Instantly."

Breha nodded. "That's the way of such things," she said, "if they're really true."

Bail cradled her arm. "You believe my wild theories, then?" he asked, smiling.

"Sometimes even a Queen is permitted to be an old romantic," she said.

"I just know how lucky we were to have her all these years," said Bail.

"How lucky we  _are_ ," she corrected him, and he nodded.

"I think—if I were wrong about them," he said, "Obi-Wan could easily have taken them both. Would have, almost certainly."

Breha nodded. "The Empire—they never knew there were two children?"

"Never," Bail confirmed. "Even Anakin never knew."

"It would have made so much sense," said Breha. " _More_  sense, if you ask me. The Empire wouldn't have been looking for two."

"I doubt they're looking for even one anymore," said Bail. "We've been so careful, all these years."

"All these years," Breha echoed. "He could have taken them both."

"I suppose so."

"And he didn't."

"He couldn't."

"He's never laid eyes on her. Not since…"

"No."

Breha's hazel eyes glistened warm and wet in the steadily brightening moonlight. The moon was half-full, now, gleaming more silver and radiant than ever before.

"I understand," she said. "But…isn't that the saddest thing you ever heard?"

Bail brushed away a stray lock of hair and kissed her cheek. He thought back on his years of struggle, of hunger, of fear. He thought of the sacrifices he had made for his people, his family, the good of the galaxy. And most of all he thought of Leia, the bright spot in his happy life, the little girl who had brought such joy to his heart and such terrible sadness to the Jedi Master's. He did not know, in that moment, if she were free or captured, living or dead, safe at the side of the last man he trusted, or lost and alone somewhere among the stars. He would give anything, he thought, to have her in his arms again. And there was nothing in him but gratitude for the years he had been blessed with a daughter to call his own.

"For him, perhaps." he said. "But for me? For us? No, starlight…I think it was the happiest thing in all the world."

Arm in arm, they took the path up from the old orchard, circling round the fountain to the south gate. They passed a few young pages and dignitaries walking and laughing among the flowers, but mostly they kept to themselves. It was nearly day-bright under the light of a full moon that seemed to take up half the heavens. They had passed close to the foot of the south stair, through a grove of fragrant blueblossoms and everlilies, when the whole canopy of elder trees lit up and shimmered in the resplendent glow of a blazing sky.

"Oh wow," said Breha, clutching her husband in innocent awe at the rapturous light. "Oh,  _wow_." Her smile shone like the heart of a star.

On the far, sheltered side of the world, for a few seconds at least, there would be terror and agony beyond all reckoning. But the capital's last instant was one of joy. In that ecstatic moment, the whole living city of Aldera was infinitely green, infinitely bright; no one in all the galaxy had ever seen such perfect beauty, nor ever after lived to tell of it.


	17. Last Remnants

 

Tarkin was back in the boardroom, eyeing his computer terminal, when Motti found him.

"Magnificent," the admiral said, beaming. "Everything we dreamed and more."

"You are easily pleased," muttered Tarkin. His mouth was drawn tight with impatience as he turned.

"Easily?" Motti echoed. "It took the destruction of a world to—"

"A magnificent defeat for the Rebellion," said Tarkin, "but a modest victory at best for us. I am convinced in the Death Star's utility as a weapon. But Alderaan was a core world in spite of its insurgencies. A wealthy one, in fact. As a mere demonstration, this display was an expensive one for the Empire."

"It is the only demonstration we will ever need," said Motti, pacing around the table. Tarkin hastily shut his data screen as the admiral approached.

"Perhaps," said Tarkin. "But if the Rebels listened to reason, we would not be in this position in the first place." He paused in his speech as his keen ears picked up the unmistakable sound of the Dark Lord approaching.

"Lord Vader," Tarkin announced cordially, leaving Motti just enough time to scurry from the room before the Dark Lord's towering black form filled the hallway.

"I have dispatched a scout force to Dantooine," said Vader. "They will reach the system before a station of this mass has calculated its own jump."

"And needlessly alert the Rebels to our coming," warned Tarkin.

"You will not like what you find there," said Vader. "She will not betray the Rebellion."

"She's little more than a child," said Tarkin. "And we have been most severe in our persuasion."

"Even so," said Vader, "she is stronger than you know. I sense it."

Tarkin knew better than to question Vader's power—not after Motti had exhausted his mercy twice in one day.

"On that account, Lord Vader, I am beginning to believe you."

"What do you mean?"

Tarkin paused as if calculating something. "She is more than a mere source of information—and I am beginning to think, much more. I dare not say more until I am sure."

"My patience is wearing thin, Governor," said the Dark Lord. "Whatever your suspicions, see to it that they are answered quickly. If she is the Rebel sympathizer her interrogations reveal her to be, there is no reason to keep her alive. If she is a young leader of the Rebellion, as I suspect, there is an added risk to it."

"We will know soon enough," said Tarkin. "I am awaiting top clearance from Imperial Centre.

Vader stood motionless for a long moment. "It is unwise to hide things from me," he breathed. But Tarkin was not easily cowed.

"It is the Emperor himself to whom I speak," he said. That was always the trump card that put Vader in his place—at least, when he could sense it was true.

Vader might have bowed—but only to the Emperor's name, not to Tarkin, whose cold smugness was beginning to bore him.

"I await the Emperor's command," said Vader. "But do not test my patience in his name."

Tarkin was a quick wit, and had much to say in response—but Vader was an unpredictable ally, and pushing him in any direction—towards rage, towards cruelty, even toward too much calculated thinking—was usually a mistake. Tarkin bowed curtly, placing himself with false humility beneath the brutal Dark Lord, and let the restless Vader be the first to take his leave. His breathing echoed in the hall and, finally, faded.

The comm built into the glistening table chirped as Tarkin hit it.

"Sir?"

"Give me an update on my data clearance," said Tarkin.

"The Emperor has reviewed the matter and approved your request," said the voice. "Royal Clearance came through just two minutes before the, uh, planetary event."

"Excellent work," said Tarkin—it was nearly the highest praise he ever offered. He shut his eyes tight and savoured those words— _Royal Clearance_. He was Vader's equal in one more way, now. There were few Imperial powers left that he did not command, and absolute access to Imperial data had been one of them.

"Prepare for transmission," he said, grinning. "I am sending you a medical print. I want it cross-referenced—" here even the rational Grand Moff lowered his voice superstitiously, as if to speak the magic words would summon Vader back— "with every medical print on file in the Jedi Temple archives."

"The…"

"Problem, Captain?"

"The… Sir, the Jedi Temple archives do not exist."

"That's right, Captain. But just the same you will transmit the order, Royal Clearance, to the receiver address I'm attaching. And you will instruct them to limit search to human, match for the highlighted gene sequences, and transmit the results immediately to my personal chambers."

"Milord—my… sir…"

Tarkin rolled his eyes:  _more power, more problems_. "Spit it out, Captain."

"All Royal Clearance communication is off-grid. Transmitted by HT wave."

"Damn," Tarkin spat, punching the console. The planetary debris.

"Clear transmission is blocked by the… uh, last…remnants." Tarkin could nearly hear the captain searching for the words to describe an entire world that wasn't there. He frowned, considering his options.

"I'm sorry, sir. The Emperor's personal frequencies are completely off-spectrum. Asteroid fields and the like disrupt the signal. The active planetary matter is still very volatile. It's directly between us and the Core. We can navigate around the edge of the disturbance and reach clear signal in…fifty-one minutes."

No good. It was too large a swing. Motti, Vader—all of them would notice such a sudden and sharp deviation. There would be questions he was not ready to answer until he had the truth in hand. He chewed at his finger thoughtfully.

"I think not, Captain," said Tarkin. He brought up the visual display onscreen, studied the position of the Death Star and the whirling chunks of the former world. Around the Death Star's perimeter, squadrons of TIE fighters escorted supply ships in and out of the station's orbit as long-range jump ships satisfied its insatiable hunger for food, fuel, the building blocks of life that a dead world could not make for itself.

He counted, briefly, the hundreds of little specks in flight, then hit the comm again.

"Change of plans," he said.

"Standing by, Sir."

"Royal Clearance transmit and receive, as directed. Load the comsat onto a TIE Line fighter from my personal shuttle escort. Send it around the perimeter of the debris field, and T/R from the far side, as soon as you reach a clear signal."

"Shall I prepare an escort?"

"Send it alone," said Tarkin. "I don't want it to be missed."

"At once, sir."

Tarkin released the comm signal and slumped into his chair. The feeling of power was euphoric—better than any spice in the galaxy. He knit his fingers, twisted his mouth in delight, and switched frames on his terminal to the security feed from the detention block.

There she was, the fierce little woman, stretched out in numb misery on the flat slab of her cell. She had been crying, perhaps, but there was even now a pervading calmness about her. Not a hair on her head was out of place: for a woman whose adoptive homeworld—for all she knew, her real homeworld—had been torn asunder, the false Princess radiated an almost preternatural calm.

What was it they used to say in his youth, when he had served as a lowly captain in the Grand Army of the Republic?  _The Force was strong in her_. He could nearly see it, he thought with distaste, as she slept— _slept!_ —after the destruction of her world.

"Who are you?" he asked the monitor silently. "My dear girl, what  _is_  your story?"


	18. Hidden Places

 

For a man like Han, who measured his personal freedom by distance and speed, there was nothing more frightening than being immobilized. The way the ship shuddered unnaturally in the pull of the tractor beam carved a hollow terror in Han's chest and left his hands trembling wildly as he left the cockpit. A fight he could handle. Making a run for it, even better, was his specialty. But this hellish wait, this feeling of entrapment, was more than he could bear.

"Alternatives to fighting," he muttered. "Alternatives, alternatives."

The power converters were shot; there was nothing left to them. He calculated how long it would take him and Chewie to swap the new ones in without exterior access: too long. And he suspected they wouldn't help; he'd flashed his afterburners more than once at star destroyers that had locked on their tractor beams, with a power none ever seemed to expect out of a timeworn cargo freighter. But this was no star destroyer. It was a world made of metal, the likes of which he had never imagined.

Chewbacca barked something about the escape pods. Shyriiwook was a hard language at the best of times; it was even harder to understand him precisely when he was this agitated.

"Yeah, if we hadn't dumped Jabba's cargo in them," he agreed.

Chewbacca pointed to the last pod, barely big enough for one—barely spaceworthy enough to get one passenger back to the planet that didn't seem to exist anymore.

"We're in this together pal, okay?" Han cuffed the Wookiee by the side of the neck.

The farm boy almost barrelled into them both, running down into the corridor.

"What about the escape pods?" he asked. Han rolled his eyes.

"They're gone, kid," he said. "Haven't had the money to replace 'em."

"What? You take on passengers without working escape pods?"

"This may come as a shock to you," said Han, "but we're not exactly operating above board here."

"What happened to them?"

"Not the time, kid. I was hauling glitterstim for the Hutts and had to dump it."

"You wasted all your escape pods for  _people_  on some  _cargo_?"

Han turned and glared, raised a threatening finger—then smiled.

"People," he muttered. "Cargo. I got an idea. Get your droids and bring 'em down here, double-time. Chewie, fix the logs. We set course for Alderaan, but abandoned ship just out of Mos Eisley to throw them off." A compliant bark was all he needed to hear.

The farm boy went for the droids. The old man, who had stood gawking at the station for far too long, shuffled down the hallway just as Han was unlatching the hidden floor compartment.

"Impressive," said Obi-Wan.

"All right, is the Empire looking for those droids of yours?"

"You might say that," said the old man. "Best to keep them out of sight."

Han nodded; there was no time even for complaint. He heard the metallic groan, felt the shudder in the hull as a remote override lowered the ship's landing gear.

"It's gonna be a tight fit," he said.

As the ship touched town with a dull thud, Luke was racing back with the two droids. He followed Han's frantic gestures to the second compartment latch and slid open the hidden panel in the floor. The R2 unit whistled brightly.

"Get in and power them down," said Han. "They'll send up an armed boarding party first, then clear them out for a scanning crew. We'll have one window to make this work."

"Oh my," said the protocol droid. "There doesn't appear to be much room."

"It's always something," Han muttered as he helped the Wookiee lower the astromech droid into the secret hold. "The droids ride with you, old man."

"Wait—you said you jettisoned the cargo?" Luke asked. "When you had these compartments right here all along?"

"Sure did," said Han.

"But why?"

The smuggler shrugged. "Because they're not really that hard to find," he said, smiling nervously.

That seemed to shut him up. Luke nodded, wide-eyed, and lowered himself numbly into the compartment. Artoo banged heavily as the mighty Wookie hoisted the astromech into the next compartment over. But he felt no pain, as such, and the whistle of alarm he gave had an altogether different meaning.

"They're coming!" the protocol droid translated. "Hurry!"

Ben was swooning, lightheaded, on the edge of the compartment when the last of his strength suddenly left him. The Force had sustained him this far; it had carried his bones a long while. But the sudden obliteration of a world teeming with life had torn a terrible hole in that living fabric. They stood now in place marred by that desolation, hovering on the edge of emptiness. There were traces of its energy, always. In time existence itself would heal, and the Force would come rushing back. But the death of a world left so very little to cling to.

Chewbacca, sensing the old man's fall, caught him quietly with a paw and helped him descend. Ben waved away the gesture of kindness—a powerful sign among Wookiees—and Chewbacca's mood changed.

"So soon?" Chewbacca said. At least, Ben thought that was the jist of it.

"Leave me be, now," he said, lowering himself into the dark. Chewbacca released him at once, his hairy face a mask of sadness.

"I'll protect him," said the Wookiee as he climbed into his own smuggling compartment. "I'll keep him safe, for as long as I can."

Ben nodded. "Luke," he called. "Remember, the Force—"

" _Shut it_!" snapped Han. "Here they come!"

Han slithered down into his compartment and jerked the panel into place. Ben lay in the darkness of the shallow hold, feeling the gentle warmth of his own ragged breath against the panel just above his nose.

What would become of Luke? The smuggler would save him—that much he could see. It would be all right. The Force brought him many visions as he prepared to pass into it: a wiser Luke, a true Jedi, beside an older, ragged Han Solo in the desert. The two of them, both men, embracing before a bonfire a galaxy away.

He was meant, perhaps, to bring them here. And that was all.

His work was done.

There were few moments in Ben's life—all of them hidden far away from the light of day—when he had been given the luxury of living for himself. Qui-Gon saw that seriousness in him, and in his own roguish ways counselled against it.  _Be mindful of the future_ , he had advised,  _but not at the expense of the moment_. In the desert, in his simple way, he had found them. There had been a garden, once, in the years before the drought—a hydroponic wonder that brought him some happiness in the longest days of his vigil. He smiled in the darkness, letting his thoughts wander to it.  _More_  than his thoughts, he realized. He was there, tending the exotic shuura fruit in his early middle age. His skin was coarse, leathery from a hard summer, but there was such strength in him still.

As it had before, Ben's whole life opened up before him. The places and times his own presence had rippled the Force called him eagerly back, not into memory or dream, but the truth of spacetime. For the first time, he drifted away from himself, from the middle-aged man tending the shuura bushes in the last glow of a binary double sunset. Wheeling upward toward the sky, he found himself afloat on the desert currents, where a pack of reptilian skettos circled over some withered prey that had wandered out to the Jundland Wastes to die.

It was the farthest he had come from himself, this place in the sky. He knew the fetters that bound him would soon be gone. All this, the Force as it was or had been or would be, would open to him as he let go of himself and passed into its embrace. The ties binding him to the desert hermit were so flimsy, now. And yet it was this hermit, this Ben Kenobi, whose pleasures he had come at last to enjoy. He returned, for a while, to taste the yellow shuura fruit on his parched lips, and to remember a little while longer. what it was to be…

"Obi-Wan."

This was not where he had expected to come again. His solitude, his quiet contemplation in the desert had been enough. It…

" _Obi-Wan!_ "

He was in another place, another memory. The Jedi Master had let his guard down for just a moment, and they had been hemmed in on the edge of the old market. The ground forces would not hold the line for long before the Republic's reinforcements wiped them out. But the all-out assault was more than Obi-Wan had ever anticipated. In an instant, his lightsaber sprang to life again, and Padmé was safe within the arc of its blade. After a squad of Grievous's personal Jedi-killers, the battle droids were little more than a nuisance.

"They shouldn't be here," said Padmé. "There's nothing to be gained by a ground assault."

Obi-Wan led her into a crumbling tunnel adjacent to the old market. "Nothing," he said, "except a distraction. Whatever their true intent, they're concealing it well."

Beneath the polished streets of the old market, the rich, rank smell of foodstuffs from a hundred worlds still rose to meet them. Only minutes ago, oblivious to the fighting in the sky, it must have been business as usual. But at some point, a rumour must have slipped through: the cramped stalls and makeshift storefronts were dark and their holos shut down so hastily that a glowing sign or two still hung shimmering in the misty air.

They passed a transparisteel cabinet of synthetic foodstuffs as well as an assortment of edible roots and fungi brought up from the deep levels. Behind it, a heavy blast door that led to a freezer was shut tight. From his belt, Obi-Wan produced a passcard that somehow tripped the lock.

"We're almost there," said Obi-Wan. "It's not in the Temple records, this one. Even Dooku doesn't know we have—"

The whine of a vintage blaster rifle powering on stopped him in his tracks.

"Hello, Leia," said Obi-Wan.

Through the hatched pipe in the black wall, a heavyset old woman with suspicious eyes peered through the steam of the rapidly condensing fresh air. She had the scent of death sticks about her.

"Who goes?" she barked. "Kenobi, is that you?"

"None other," he said; then, correcting himself, "well, one other. Padmé, this is Leia Sindriss. An old friend."

"A spy, honey," said Leia Sindriss, offering a meaty hand. "I'm properly called a spy."

"A spy?" Padmé asked. "Against the Republic?"

The old woman nodded. "A spy  _for_  the Republic, really. But for itself, against itself, you might say."

"I don't understand," said Padmé.

"No need to understand," the old woman barked. "Just follow. I didn't think you were comin', Kenobi."

In the next freezer over, the woman rolled aside a heavy tank full of ion eels, thrashing and raging in their frozen tank. Beneath the tank, a single trapdoor opened into a low tunnel.

"We nearly didn't make it," said Obi-Wan. "The fighting's worst at the Senate, but it's a full-scale assault. They came at us with everything they've got."

Leia Sindriss narrowed her eyes and scrutinized the young woman at his side.

"That's her," she sneered. "That Senator you're always—"

"Yes," shot Obi-Wan, frowning. " _That_  senator. The one who's been targeted time after time for assassination." He lowered his voice. "If we hadn't made it out of the Senate, she'd be dead. Dooku's come himself this time—I can sense it. He knows every inch of the Jedi Temple, every nook and cranny of the official buildings."

"If that's true," said Padmé, "Not even the Chancellor is safe. If Chancellor Palpatine should be killed, or taken—"

"He'll be all right," Obi-Wan assured her. "Anakin will be with him."

"Anakin?" Padmé asked. "With…the Chancellor?"

"Yes," said Obi-Wan. There was something dark and troubled in her, then, but the young Jedi Master was preoccupied.

"Enough politics," snapped the old woman. "Here's what I've heard. The  _Invisible Hand_  is locked above the Senate. Comms are still down, but a couple of the defensive squads are using the smuggler frequencies."

"How are they doing?" Obi-Wan asked.

At the sound of blaster fire above, Leia motioned to the trap door.

"Get in and keep moving," she croaked. "That's how they're doing."

Obi-Wan and Padmé dropped to their bellies in the narrow trap door and slithered into the low tunnel. With surprising dexterity the old woman was behind them, stopping only to trigger the trapdoor mechanism.

"The ion eels will keep them from getting a scan on the hatch," she explained. "Doesn't mean you're home free yet."

They moved in near-silence for a time, except for the clatter of Leia's blaster rifle against the side of the tunnel. The hatch it led to was biometrically sealed and she had to crawl over them both to get it open. It took a facial scan, fingerprints, and a few smacks with the butt of her rifle to get the latch unhooked.

"The finest in Core World living," she said laconically.

"It's funny," whispered Obi-Wan. "It was Dooku himself who told us, when I was still a Padawan, to keep a hidden place for myself, unknown even to the Jedi."

Padmé scrunched up her face. "Dooku said that?"

Obi-Wan nodded wistfully. "He always said the Jedi were vulnerable to corruption. When I was a boy, he warned us someone very high up would one day fall to the Dark Side. I suppose he just didn't know it would be him."

"Bad time to get sentimental," said Leia Sindriss. "Get in." She gave the Jedi Master a hard swat on the rear, as if guiding a stubborn nerf into a pen.

"You're saving our lives," said Obi-Wan. "One tends to get sentimental."

Padmé looked at him with wonder. "I didn't think the Jedi—"

"Oh, they're human, too," said Leia. "Leastwise the human ones. Aren't they, Obi?"

Obi-Wan turned about in the little capsule and fixed her with his steel-grey eyes. It was high enough to crouch, not to stand.

"Listen to me," he said softly. "Once we're locked in, Leia, I want you to get yourself clear, get to somewhere safe. Don't get caught up in the fighting. You haven't seen action like this, not here, not anywhere."

"I can handle myself," she said.

"If you get shot up there, we starve down here."

"Just the same," said Leia. "I'm going to take a few of those rustbuckets with me before I go out."

Obi-Wan sighed sadly. "If that's what you feel is right. But remember—the battle droids are no laughing matter."

Leia nodded. "The battle droids are no laughing matter," she repeated.

"Be sure to keep your distance from the fighting."

"I'll keep my distance," she promised.

"You must come back for us."

"I must come back for you."

"Now get going…and thank you."

"I'm going," she said dizzily. She backed out of the entry hatch and shut it with a hiss of air. Obi-Wan powered on some controls and dialled in a warmer temperature. It was frightfully cold.

Padmé cast her eyes around the cramped interior. "Is this an escape pod?"

Obi-Wan smiled. "It was a very fine escape pod, several decades ago."

"That's brilliant," she said. "Protected from surface scans. It'd take a Star Destroyer's scanners to pick up life in here." She sat up awkwardly on her elbows as Obi-Wan patted the wall appreciatively.

"What they cannot see, they cannot fight," he said. "We're deep below the Senate markets, now. And the life support is adequate for deep space. It ought to last forever down here, planetside."

Padmé looked around the pod nervously.

"Forever," she whispered.

"I hope you're not claustrophobic."

From a future years away—from a galaxy with no escape pod, with no Alderaan, no blue dress, no Padmé—Ben Kenobi watched himself with the eyes of age. He watched her, across time, across space, across the gossamer wall between life and death.

Yes.

This was where he would wait for the end. This tiny pod, this hidden place—hidden even from himself—was where he felt the Light strongest of all.

"I'm not claustrophobic," she said. She was very near him.

"It's hardly luxurious for a Senator," said Obi-Wan.

"It's luxurious enough for a Jedi," she said.

He shrugged. "We are accustomed to doing without such comforts," he said.

"You deny yourself so much."

Obi-Wan nodded. "It's the way."

"You deny them until they're gone."

"Yes."

"You miss her," she said abruptly.

Obi-Wan looked at her. "The Force is stronger in you than you know."

She shook her head. "No, I didn't sense it. I just know what it means…to regret things."

"I have regrets," said Obi-Wan.

"Regret without memory is a terrible thing," said Padmé.

Obi-Wan smiled. "Do you remember when we used to talk like this?" he asked her.

"Years ago," she said. Then, "Before…"

"Before everything."

"Yes."

"That was a long time ago," he sighed. "Far, far away from here."

"Another galaxy," she whispered against his ear. "Another time."


	19. Old Meditations

 

Hangar Bay 327 was located in Sector N6, a long way from the Death Star's command deck. By the time Darth Vader made his way to the hangar, a heavily armed boarding party had already stormed onto the mysterious ship and swept it with their usual clumsiness. That, too, would make his job harder. But Vader knew his ships, particularly the old pre-Clone Wars models, and he knew the creative ways in which Outer Rim scavengers, smugglers, and spacers creatively modified such craft for action. His expertise in starcraft mechanics was very old knowledge, buried deep in his shattered bones; but it came when called upon, just like the Force. And the bizarre circumstances surrounding the little cargo ship were a puzzle meant, perhaps, for Vader alone to solve.

The ship was a sleeper—that much was clear to him. Built from an unwieldy, asymmetrical YT-1300 light freighter, it was heavily retrofitted for what Vader presumed was smuggling in seriously hostile space. From three decks above the ship, he could spot the massive round dish of the rectifying antenna—a military-grade sensor necessary for missile targeting. Sure enough, when he reached the flight deck, he spotted where the cargo coupling between the forward mandibles had been stripped away to make room for a hidden battery of concussion missiles. The appearance of a cargo coupling had been restored, but it had been a clumsy welding job, sacrificing reliability for concealment and failing at both. He wondered what other surprises the ship might hold, how many of them would be revealed by the scanning crew, and how many he would return to discover himself once matters with the Princess had been resolved.

He circled the hull with an almost pleasant curiosity, distracted from the pain of each step by the enigma of the empty vessel. A full crew would be better equipped to sweep the ship, but Vader resolved to supervise them as directly as he could. There were few men left in the galaxy who knew pre-Imperial ships and scavengers' mechanics as well as he did; but the best smugglers could be cunning, and he was not sure the Death Star's crew would be a match for them.

A tremor in the Force struck him as he approached the vessel, like a wave of light washing over him. It was a weak tremor, flagging, fleeting, but its signature was unmistakeable. He jerked his head up towards the hidden drop gun as he rounded the curve of the cockpit. It was as much movement as his black helmet would allow, and he wondered what other illegal modifications lurked just out of his narrow field of view.

The docking bay's security officer came down the ramp to meet him with the last of the initial boarding party in tow. "There's no one on board, sir," he began. "According to the log, the crew abandoned ship right after takeoff." But Vader's mind was already on the uncanny coincidence that a ship out of Mos Eisley would have followed him directly here at unbelievable speed. He did not need to feel Kenobi's presence to know the hallmarks of his old master.

"Did you find any droids?" Vader asked.

"No sir," Captain. "If there were any on board they must also have jettisoned."

"Send a scanning crew aboard," said Vader. "I want every part of this ship checked. I sense something…a presence I've not felt since—"

 _Since when_? Vader left his ominous statement hanging as soon as he realized he did not know how to finish it. Since the fight on Mustafar, nearly twenty years ago? Or since Obi-Wan's presence struck him on board the  _Tantive IV_ , just a few standard days before? He recalled his old Master's voice, heard it echo in the back of his mind—heard all the smugness and superiority, the stubborn optimism, the quiet confidence that was somehow far more aggravating than open boasting. That voice came always with a unique presence in the Force. He was sure he had felt it above Tatooine. But aboard the  _Devastator_ , they had taken his command literally, methodically tearing the ship down to scrap in search of the plans. Obi-Wan was nowhere to be found. And now, this feeling aboard another ship… he dared not trust it. Was it a projection of some kind? A subtle power in the Force his Master had not taught him?

From the edge of the hangar bay, Vader reached out with the Force again. His sensory powers had dulled somewhat with time, as he concentrated on bending existence to his will; but with ample anger, the Force obeyed. There, again, was that glimmer of Obi-Wan's energy. It was weak, but there could be no denying it. Obi-Wan's presence was filling these rebel ships—and if he was not physically aboard them, he wanted it to appear as if he was.

In short, it was a mystery; and Vader hated mysteries.

Anger at the befuddlement of his own powers shifted into a cloud of fear so palpable that it pushed officers out of his path, as if he had shoved them aside with enormous intangible shoulders. None dared to question his passing—none save a staggering droid, an insufferable RA-7 protocol model, that could not perceive his malevolence.

"My Lord," it began, approaching him mid-stride, "Governor Tarkin has ordered—"

"Governor Tarkin does not presume to order  _me_ ," said Vader. "I am retiring to my meditation chamber. If he requests my presence on the Overbridge, he may leave notice with my attendant."

"Yes, my Lord," said the droid, hesitating only a moment as its programs conflicted.

Vader paused only a moment above the hangar, letting his malevelonce pour into the space, inviting the Dark Side to overwhelm Kenobi's trickery and grant him peace from whatever Force projection the old man had sent. The comlink controls in his helmet were seldom used; he had to stop walking altogether and fidget with the side of the mouth controls to trigger them. But Admiral Motti's onboard communications systems were no place for Sith matters.

"Yes, Master?" came the expected voice, almost immediately.

"I'm coming up," he said. "Have the Qabbrat prepared for a meditation cycle."  
"It stands ready, My Lord."

"Is the Death Star equipped to run a healing cycle?"

A pause. "In theory, my Lord. The Qabbrat is built to your personal specifications from Mustafar."

"Prepare a healing cycle," he ordered. "And see that I am not disturbed. Governor Tarkin may try."

"He will fail," the voice assured him.

The chamber occupied the back wall of Vader's personal apartment, which was as sparsely furnished and empty as a prison cell. It was fully powered and waiting for him, and the Emperor's toadying attendant, Vaneé, had discreetly slipped away before his arrival. The portable chamber was a poor substitute for the master Qabbrats on Mustafar and Imperial Centre, assembled with no more care than any other part of the Death Star—but as the dome sealed itself with a hiss, Vader felt considerable relief as the outside world rushed away from him. Steeling himself for the agony of natural breathing, he initiated the healing sequence and allowed his mind to drift back to his old master. He was not quite himself in their duel on Mustafar, at a place where the Dark Side grew strongest. But if he was willing to look farther back, into the forbidden life of Anakin Skywalker, he could rediscover Obi-Wan's energy, and calm his fury around it so that he could better perceive it. Perhaps, given time, he could even track it back to its source. Then, Obi-Wan would pay…but those thoughts were of the future, and had no place in Vader's meditation. As the clumsy control arm broke the seal on his helmet and the chamber filled with a crude medicinal gas, he let his mind return to the young Jedi knights and their last mission together before he broke free of the Jedi's chains once and for all.

There was a poetic symmetry to Vader's meditation. Just as Obi-Wan was to be the last Jedi Master, the loose end left untied, Vader's thoughts drifted back the moment of his birth, to the sweet moment he killed his first Jedi Master. He had called himself Darth Tyranus, though Vader was unsure if the Emperor had ever truly bestowed the title of Darth on him. He was, in the end, no Sith Lord at all—only Dooku, a deluded Jedi Master tricked into betraying the Order and himself.

Vader centered himself on that moment. The Emperor had not yet named him, but it was the first moment he felt himself come into power, felt that he could become stronger than even Anakin Skywalker. The surging darkness was young in him, and he clung to it to guide his meditation. In spite of himself, in spite of his loathing for the Jedi and Obi-Wan and all that been swept away, it was the weak-willed, snivelling, foolhardy boy—Anakin Skywalker—that he hated most.

In his mind's eye, he felt the sabers slice through the flesh of Dooku's neck, watched with cold satisfaction as the Light returned to the old man's eyes in a moment of horrible regret as the blades finished him. He had dwelt on that moment many times. But he turned his thoughts aside now, to the world he despised revisiting. He found Obi-Wan's presence immediately, turned it over in his mind, studying it as he reached out to it with his wicked desire for revenge.

 _Revenge_.

Obi-Wan was weak. He had not fought like himself against Dooku; even then, Vader knew, he had mastered every saber defense and with Anakin's help, should have made short work of the phony Sith Lord. Perhaps the Emperor had known some battle meditation after all; he resented that his master had not taught him this skill. Or perhaps Obi-Wan had been troubled by something, shaken by the week-long assault on Coruscant or the loss of his pitiful Jedi friends.

"Anakin," said the Emperor. "There's no time. We must get off the ship before it's too late."

The stupid boy crouched over Obi-Wan's crumpled body.

"He seems to be all right," said Anakin.

"Leave him, or we'll never make it," the Emperor commanded. He was not  _yet_  Emperor, Vader realized—with some relief. It was the last time he had openly disobeyed his master.

"His fate will be the same as ours," Anakin snapped back with supreme arrogance.

Of course the Master was right. Of course he should have left Obi-Wan to die. At long last, that was an error he would soon correct.

Vader probed deeper.

He understood now the attack was gambit, a ruse. He understood why the  _Invisible Hand's_  hyperdrive had come offline over Coruscant, understood why the separatist fleet was left defending the orbiting fortress for interminable days while the Jedi came out of hiding and scrambled to regroup. The Emperor's machinations had arranged the assault from the beginning, and the Emperor patiently awaited their assault on the ship. How long would he have waited if they had not come?

But the Emperor knew. He must have known. Vader was already loyal. He had rushed to protect Palpatine, without sparing a thought for…no. Focus on Obi-Wan. Focus on revenge.

His old master was all smugness and self-satisfaction again as they shuttled the Emperor—Palpatine, he corrected himself—back through the military blockade that was finally settling down as the separatist ships withdrew in defeat. Anakin studied his master even then, which only made Vader's impression of him stronger. Even foolish Anakin knew him well enough to know he was a serious and troubled man, and his arrogance covered a certain disquiet.

He breathed a sigh of relief when they touched down. The Emperor's favoured courtiers and advisors had gathered to meet him. There would be insufferable politicking to come; Vader's distaste for it was nearly all he shared with Anakin.

Obi-Wan hesitated as they disembarked—no, he realized. Obi-Wan hid himself in the shuttle on their return.

"Are you coming, Master?" asked the boy. He did not see with Vader's cold shrewdness.

"Oh no, I'm not brave enough for politics," Obi-Wan lied. "I have to report to the Council." Vader's senses, his inquisitor's senses, bored into that lie, sensed Obi-Wan's quiet reservations. While Anakin bantered like a fool with the old man, Vader probed him, sensing his powers of deception, of misdirection, in the fullness of their strength. Obi-Wan was the greatest liar he had ever known. It was the master's deceptions, not his lightsaber, that Vader faced now, and it was these dark spots in the master's aura he studied most carefully. Obi-Wan's purity and conviction, as always, were an impenetrable armour. But Vader was a hundred times more sensitive now to the miniscule cracks in everyone—the places where the Dark Side made its way in and took root.

Anakin frowned sullenly as he turned away from the shuttle, and Vader meant to pull away too. The mission to recover Palpatine, completed only a few standard days after the Battle of Coruscant began, was the last of Anakin's adventures with the old man. They would speak again a few more times over the coming days, but that mission was the last he would feel of Obi-Wan's true strength, his active channelling of the Force, until… until the fire…

Vader doubled over in his meditation chamber, choking on the noxious medicine. His blasted lungs burned and he reached instinctively for the panic controls. They would do nothing in this prison while his helmet was still recharging, while its piercing hypodermics were still feet away from his skin. His concentration on the Dark Side made him powerful, but there was no healing to be had in it. Weak, feeble coughs wracked his body as he cleared his mind, tried to breathe, tried to free himself from the prison of drowning in his own darkness.

No breath came for a long moment. He felt himself dizzying, and with the helmet off there was no medicine to stabilize his reeling mind. He reached out, like a man in free fall—

There she was.

Padmé had been waiting for him— _no!_ —waiting for Anakin, he corrected—in the forest of towering columns that flanked the Senate building and served as an elegant noise baffle against the arrival and departure of transport ships. It was a place well suited to whispers—perhaps even by design—and Vader felt her presence too—a shimmering joy, an indomitable light—before he saw or heard her. He said his hasty departure from some senator in the Emperor's retinue and rushed to her impatiently.

"Oh, Anakin," she sighed breathlessly. Anakin sighed, too. Even Vader sighed for a moment, scorching his ragged lungs. Regulators jolted his heart painfully back into rhythm as it raced momentarily without the suit's authorization. Shuddering, he inhaled as deeply as he dared.

This was…more stable. Some tiny pinpoint of light in his cavernous spirit was not opposed to healing. In a fully pressurized Qabbrat, he could take a handful of shallow breaths unassisted now. For all his might, for all the power he felt crushing the wind out of men across vast distance, it was in these shallow, wheezing breaths that he felt truly strong.

 _The Dark Side can be bent to your will_ , he told himself with conviction. But his mind remained fixed on Anakin's wife.

"I've missed you, Padmé," said Anakin. It seemed like the thing to say. He had never been good at articulating these emotions—emotions muted by all the doctrine of the late Jedi, only to be stamped out entirely by the Sith. He could not speak well about them, but he could feel them. Vader felt them, too. A single breath, long and ragged, brought the medicine deep into his ruined lungs.

Padmé drew back from him, then, and a shadow passed over her face, some hidden silent fear. Even Anakin sensed it. Vader, his senses finely tuned to fear, could smell it plainly even across two decades of regret.

Anakin's eyes searched hers, probing for the source of that fear.

"There were whispers that you'd been killed," she breathed. It was a redirect, he understood; but it was more than enough for the foolish boy's ego.

"I'm all right," he smiled. "It feels like we've been apart for a lifetime." Anakin's hand, his real true left hand, brushed the skin of her neck. Vader's lungs took another breath. The boy's lips traced hers. He would have her in his arms again that night, nearly that hour. He felt it; he craved it. He dared not touch her this way, not here on the floor of the Senate itself. But he was gripped by a young man's eager passion, now, and its power would not be denied. Words danced between them in the silence, but he did not heed them, and his memories were cloudy, indistinct. For a moment, there was only the purest of light between them, a light Vader held just long enough to feel the medicines doing their work—then again, the shadow of fear passed over her and the moment of light was gone.

Vader drew back from the happy memory, kept his wits even as Anakin did not. Somewhere, years upon light years away, his mechanical hand struck a button to end the healing cycle. He had lost his grip on that moment, and there would be no more Force healing today.

"You're trembling," said Anakin, his eyes suddenly dark. "What's going on?"

"Something wonderful has happened," Padmé said. Her tone was light, but she did not smile, especially not at the eyes.

"Ani—I'm pregnant."

"That's wonderful," he stammered. It was he alone who smiled. Vader could feel the fear in her, the sadness. In Anakin, he felt only joy. And he knew what was to become of that joy.

"This is a happy moment," said the boy. "The happiest moment of my life."

Vader used the boy's stupidity to center himself. They would make love again that night for the last time, and that, too, was a memory so polluted by the Dark Side now that no healing could be drawn from it. It did not matter. That was, he reminded himself, not what he had come to the chamber for. He had come for Kenobi. He had come to remember his last adventure with the old man, to remember the precise feeling of Kenobi's shimmering presence in the Force. But in the glow of that meditation, with powerful Force potions swirling in his lungs and the momentary touch of the light in him, he felt his perceptions renewed. And he felt that power darken almost immediately as he bent his will to the hunt.

Vader had been baffled over Scarif. He had been confused aboard the  _Tantive IV_  and utterly helpless over Tatooine. Kenobi had hidden himself well, and it was a wonder Vader had sensed him at all. Now, fully prepared for it, rested and healed, able to reach out for a short time with his feelings as he had done in years long past, there was no denying it.

Kenobi was aboard the ship—or had been, an hour ago. He was away from it now, but had not gone far. For all the weakness of that aura, Vader turned it over in his heightened senses, dissected it: it was an unmistakeable mixture of stubborn optimism, quiet compassion, brash confidence and steely resolve.

The helmet lowered into place. The agony of two dozen needles locking back into his skull brought him back to his full, dark focus. Obi-Wan was actively using the Force, he realized. It rippled around him as he moved. The very powers that would conceal him, no doubt, to every other security presence aboard the station would shine like a beacon to Vader's senses.

Tarkin had been wise enough not to disturb him, and for that Vader was grateful. It was an uncommon man who possessed such wisdom without compromising his cruelty, and Vader did not resent the Governor's command of the station as much as he resented the other Imperial officers. He hastened now to the overbridge, hoping in spite of his loyalties that Tarkin himself had not yet deduced the nature and identity of the intruder. It was a rare excuse to pull rank with the first and most powerful Grand Moff, after all: as the highest-ranking officer under Imperial Command, Tarkin's governance was supreme. But on certain matters, including the extermination of the Jedi, Vader's authority outstripped even Tarkin's. He imagined himself, for a long moment, crushing the life from his old master. No interrogation, no greater military strategy—only death and revenge.

"Vader, release him," Tarkin might urge. But in this matter, Vader could well say:  _No._

Indeed, Vader's rivalry with Tarkin was tempered with respect for the Grand Moff's abilities and cunning. When he stormed onto the overbridge, he was caught off-guard only a moment to see Obi-Wan's old war records shimmering in the air above the conference table. Tarkin, working tirelessly long after the officers and scurried to their quarters, was reviewing the old Jedi file just as the Sith Lord entered. He was impressed, but not surprised, that Tarkin had also identified Obi-Wan's handiwork somewhere in the heist of the station's plans. He was vastly more cunning than even Vader gave him credit for, and if Vader's suspicions had not already been absolute, discovering the Grand Moff poring over Kenobi's files confirmed it. The presence was Obi-Wan's, he now knew with absolute certainty. With the simplest of thoughts, he pinpointed the old man's energy. It was unmistakable now, but something else—no, some _one_  else—was here with him…

Tarkin hastily shut down the holodisplay as Vader strode into the room, looking rather like a cat caught with a canary. Vader gestured to the round globe of the holo-display and took the rare opportunity to speak first: " _He_  is  _here_."

Tarkin's brows huddled close together in confusion. "Obi-Wan Kenobi?" he asked. "What makes you think so?"

Vader hated having to explain himself. "A tremor in the Force," he said. "The last time I felt it was in the presence of my old Master."

A lifetime away, with incredible lightness of step and calmness among the chaos, he felt himself running silently through the halls of battle cruisers and space stations at his master's side. He remembered the fights, remembered Obi-Wan at the height of his skill, and he felt the regulators in his armor kick in, jolting his lungs and heart painfully to steady his quickening pulse. Tarkin went on about something, but suddenly Vader's mind was far away, rooted in the conflict to come, and on one—no,  _two_ —incredibly bright presences in the Force that glinted and shone in his mind's eye.

So. Obi-Wan had brought apprentices. Two of them, untrained but ferociously strong. His perceptions dulled, his sensitivity in the Force replaced by power to bend it to his will, the subtleties of their energies had eluded him. But now they were starting to come into relief, and there was something eerily familiar about them, as well.

They were moving toward the captured freighter, all of them. The Princess must have been with them, unless—was she one of his new disciples? It explained everything—her resistance to the mind probe, the strange sameness in their energies—everything. He knew in that moment she was gone from her cell, knew it even before the alert came in to Tarkin that she had escaped.

"Obi-Wan is here," Vader insisted. "The Force is with him."

"If you're right," said Tarkin, "he must not be allowed to escape."

He sensed, clear as a cloudless night, the conflict in Kenobi. The light radiating within him was too subtle for Vader to comprehend, but he understood fully the current of darkness: he had come here for revenge, to settle their score once and for all. Their destinies, once again, were entwined in the unlikeliest of places.

"Escape is not his plan," said Vader. "I must face him alone." Tarkin dared utter nothing in answer as the Dark Lord of the Sith turned from the room and readied himself for the fight of his life.


	20. Only What You Take With You

 

_Obi-Wan…there is good in him…I know…there is still…_

In the darkness of the  _Falcon_ 's smuggling compartments, he had nearly slipped away. All the strength had faded from his limbs. The drought-blasted heart, the scorched arteries ruined by the patient desert, screamed out for rest. The hungry sands, ten billion years old, still waited for him to die. He had brought the boy as far as he dared—as far, perhaps, as the Force needed him to. He had returned to his place of bliss. He had made his peace, or tried to. He had resigned himself to the end.

And yet, Ben Kenobi did not die.

His face burned, still shining red from where the heat of the lava had scorched it even from six feet away. He watched her with cold horror as she lay on the medical platform as if already dead, weaker of body—and worse, spirit—than he had ever seen her. There was a coldness in her, a hollowness that defied all reason. The Polis Massa asteroid field held the most sophisticated medical droids in the Outer Rim; yet they were baffled by the sickness in her that went deeper than blood and bone.

"She's dying?" Obi-Wan asked, incredulous.

"For reasons we cannot explain, she has lost the will to live," said one of the droids. It struck Obi-Wan then, and Ben now, as the most supremely stupid thing ever said in the history of the galaxy. He wanted to tear the medical droid's head from its body. But Master Yoda was there, watching him, and he was careful not to want it too deeply.

Obi-Wan had felt the full blast of Dooku's Force lightning, and it was no mere jolt or sudden shock. He had been thrown against electrical barriers on his adventures, and stunned by high-voltage wires, and tormented by shock probes. From the outside, Force lightning looked like that. But within him, it had torn an invisible chasm; it was a direct attack to the soul, a maiming so profound that the blazing electrical discharge was nearly an afterthought to its power. Even a moment's exposure left a darkness in you that took a long time to appear, much less to heal.

He felt that darkness festering in her now. Her delicate, birdlike throat had been nearly crushed by Vader's grip—but the Sith Lord had crushed deeper and truer things than that. She was overwhelmed by his darkness, a darkness that had poured out of him and straight into her innermost heart. She fought not to purge it from her, but to contain it—to keep it, perhaps, from poisoning Anakin's child.

This was a sickness beyond medicine. It was killing her, and he was watching it. As he watched it through the ages, a terrible anger stirred in him. And he did not die.

 _Rise_ , said the Dark Side. Ben rose.

_Can you feel him?_

Ben could feel him.

_He is searching for you._

Let him find me. Let him come.

 _Feel the power of his hatred. He is still strong, very strong_.

Yes. Will you make me strong?

 _I will make you stronger_.

He's too powerful. He was the Chosen One. His blood was so strong.

_He has wasted his potential. He is a machine, severed from life. You are wise, whole, perfected. You could be a greater warrior than Vader. Greater than Sidious, even._

This—this is what ancient Dooku must have felt in the bloodthirsty grip of Makashi. The pain evaporated from his joints. A terrible strength came flooding back to them.

 _The Imperials are weak. It has been nineteen years since they faced a Jedi. And now they are trapped on this metal moon with you_.

I could kill them all.

 _Give yourself to me_ , said the Dark Side.  _We can stop them together. I will make you swift and terrible. I will teach you my secrets. I will unlock your full potential, and this time you will not fail her. You will not fail the galaxy._

Ben took a ragged breath, calmed himself. In his mind, Obi-Wan stood at Padmé's bedside, clutching her cold hand.

"I do not need you," he whispered.

 _Yes you do_.  _You're a dead man, Obi-Wan_.  _You came to your peace. Only your anger, your hatred, are what keep you alive now._

He shut out the voice, but could not silence Padmé's screams.

They kept him on his feet. They gripped his heart, squeezed it, pumped it. Then again.

There was no lying to himself; he knew where his strength was coming from, and for what purpose. His saber was out, but he dared not lash out at the troopers. Giving in to the Dark Side would send up a powerful beacon to the Sith Lord, and he was not ready for that. With supreme gentleness, old Ben walked among them as he had been taught. He sensed them, moved with them, breathed in the life force around him. Fewer of the troopers than he expected were of clone stock, now. Even in this skeletal place, the Living Force was strong. Even the so-called Death Star was teeming with human life. Even between his soul and Vader's, the threads of that energy were spun.

He shut down the tractor beam generator for sector N6—a simple enough task, now—and then answered the final call: The darkness in him was calling him on to Vader. And the shred of light in Vader's tattered soul, perhaps, called him on to Obi-Wan as well.

He followed that force. They circled each other, a mile apart—then half a mile. He brushed past unwitting stormtroopers in the hallway, and they felt only coldness. They were nothing to him now.

His step quickened. Vader's stride was slow, laboured. Was he—yes, he was heavily armoured. Of course, he would have to be. He was slow and clumsy now; Obi-Wan felt it. Even in the dessicated shell of his own corpse, Obi-Wan could be faster. He could be stronger. The Force would give him the strength to kill this one last time.

Its energy flared in him. He channeled the memories that would bring him into his anger.

The boy, Luke, was born as she lay dying. Even as her life left her, he watched as she protected the child from the creeping darkness inside her. His loathing for Vader was complete—but in the moment he held the boy, as much as he willed it, his hatred for the father did not, would not pass to the son.

The conflict was powerful. Always he came back to this place when his thoughts turned to revenge. But in that place, in that cold funereal moment, there was so much light in them. Even in that moment, the very source of his festering hate, there was too much love to turn him.

She screamed anew as the second babe was born. This one was smaller, less furious in her arrival. She had waited to be born last, and she endured her passage into the world with a quiet grace.

"It's a girl," he said, astonished.

Padmé strained to meet the child's face. She only needed to look on it a moment—then, she met his eyes.

"Leia," she said simply—and that name was enough. Through the mask of pain, she smiled at the eyes, and he knew the truth.

Leia's presence in his arms. This feeling. It was this moment he had not allowed himself to remember.

He gave her to Bail Organa, in the end. He knew the hardship that awaited Anakin's boy in his care. He would not have it for her. He could not bear it. She would grow up as the princess of a prosperous world, a world completely at peace, in the house of the noblest man Obi-Wan knew outside of the Order. She would want for nothing. She would be safe. And perhaps, one day—

He felt her fear, now, suddenly, very close by. Of course. Vader had found her. She was  _here_.

The Dark Side gnawed angrily at him as he watched Padmé die, as he had watched it in his nightmares for twenty years, as the greatness of his failure wore him down to hollowness and regret. But he brushed it away with a thought. She was here. Luke was here. The last legacy of Padmé was here on this battle station with him.

He had to protect them—had to see them to safety. Their lives were more important even than Vader's death. It was in that moment he let all thought of revenge slip away. He understood at last Yoda's shame, Yoda's folly. The anger left him in a cool rush, in a single breath—and all the strength of the Dark Side went with it.

Obi-Wan slumped against the durasteel wall of the corridor, his body reeling as the cruel force that had held it together began to fade. Old Ben, the dark hooded figure behind which he had hidden for so long—even from himself—slipped away from him.

 _Now you will die_ , said the Dark Side.  _You cannot protect her without me_.

But the Dark Side lied. And Obi-Wan was too skilled a liar to fall for it now.

Killing Vader would not save Leia, he realized. The Sith Lord was irredeemably bound to his master; his death would be felt immediately, would bring the whole wrath of the Imperial Fleet down on them. The Emperor's scrutiny would trigger a massive security response, too, and the tiny depowered gap in their impenetrable tractor beam array would be instantly discovered and corrected at the first diagnostic scan. No—their escape depended on a security force ten thousand strong continuing to underestimate their importance. Killing Vader would ensure their deaths, now.

Obi-Wan frowned, sweating hard, trying to steady himself. He could not kill Vader, but neither could he yield the battlefield. Vader was hunting them all, and could not be left to succeed. With patience and care he weighed his options. There were not many.

With a calm mind, Obi-Wan reached out to Vader, whose mind had entered an eerie calm of its own. Vader's anger had clouded his perceptions for decades; as a master manipulator, Kenobi had counted on it. But now, by sheer will alone, Vader's evil eye was seeking the children. He would find them before long, unless…

 _Vader,_  he called in his mind.

The immense black shadow of his pupil's presence descended on him instantly, like a bird of prey out of a cloudless night.

 _Obi-Wan_.

 _I have come for your blood_ , he called. His deceptions were so perfected now that he could lie even in thought.  _Come to me and finish this_.

Aboard the  _Millennium Falcon_ , mechanical hands long out of practice struggled to replace the access panel of a repurposed infiltration droid. Working hastily in total darkness, Vader had wired the droid to operate as a homing beacon; using the same crude methods and parts of the smugglers themselves, who had rigged a hundred conflicting systems into the ship's mainframe, Vader was putting the hasty finishing touches on the device's obsolete interface plug when the Jedi Master's call reached him.

He paused in his work. His hand went to his lightsaber—but he hesitated. With a clear mind, Vader could sense them all converging on the impounded freighter. He waited for them in the darkness of the ship, where he had thought to take them by surprise and end their rescue in a single flurry of inescapable horror. But the things he had found there as he worked and waited gave him pause.

_Why do you hide from me, Vader? If you are so powerful, why hide from your destiny?_

He knew even with his respirator momentarily silenced, even concentrating fully, he could not hide from Kenobi's senses. The powers of perception that came to his mechanical flesh with great difficulty came naturally as breathing to the old man; his ambush, if he stayed, was forfeit anyway.

 _This confrontation will be your last, Kenobi_.

 _Perhaps it will, old friend_.

Reluctantly, sensing some deception he could not place, Vader finished his work. The Falcon's absurdly oversized rectifying antenna dish, as he had spotted from above, was actually a modified control dish salvaged from a Separatist-era battledroid command ship. It had been clumsily wired as both a receiver and a transmitter, enabling the ship's highly illegal battery of guided concussion missiles and providing a powerful long-range interceptor of Imperial communication chatters. That long-range capability, he knew, could be exploited: over hyperwave, the infiltrator droid's rudimentary homing beacon could stretch through hyperspace itself, covering tens of thousands of light years. If the Rebels somehow eluded him—and if Vader left the ship to deal with Kenobi, he had to accept they might—the homing beacon would make the difference between success and failure. And he would not fail the Emperor again.

To conceal his impending ambush, Vader had left a token force of five stormtroopers stationed around the base of the ship. They snapped to attention as he slipped like a shadow down the loading ramp.

"Send for your units," Vader breathed to one of the troopers. "I want three squads protecting this ship at any cost."

"Sir."

 _Come to me, Padawan. I am ready to teach you one final lesson_.

Vader bristled at Obi-Wan's condescension. He tried again to sense the location of Kenobi's students, and found them a respectable distance from the ship; but as Obi-Wan's taunts drew him out, his concentration on their Force signatures waned. They would be easier to hunt down in the bowels of the station after Kenobi was dead, after his smugness and insolence were silenced forever.

 _You are a fool to challenge the power of the Dark Side_.

He was coming.

After two decades of suffering, the desire for revenge could not be wholly pushed from Obi-Wan's mind. The Dark Side tugged at him, promised him all the power he could ask for, tempted him with vengeance and justice and an end to his pain.

It would have been a fitting end to both of them, pitting his vengeance against Vader's hatred. One last time, he might have called up the strength and speed of his glorious youth and finished their duel as it began. But that glorious youth had been a lie; it was the last militant gasp of a fallen Jedi Order, and its tainted ways would not come again into the galaxy if Obi-Wan could help it. There was a purer path, one the militant Jedi, the political Jedi, had not walked for many generations. And it was this path Obi-Wan chose.

He felt the agony roaring back to his bones as the strength of darkness slipped away from him. The lightsaber in his hand was as heavy as a stone. He gripped it with both hands, cleared his mind, and marched into the hangar hallway just as Vader did.

 _Obi-Wan,_  she breathed. It was the last name on Padmé's lips as she died. It was the name he'd tried to forget, the name no one had called him since—except, now, in her message, Leia.  
  
It was a name he'd not heard in a long time.

"I've been waiting for you, Obi-Wan," said Darth Vader. There was no more time for reminiscence.


	21. Duel of the Masters

 

They stood. They approached each other. An unseen litany of mental and physical Force defenses sprang between them.

Vader gripped his saber like a weapon. Obi-Wan held his like a wand.

 _Defense. Insight. Patience_.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the brash young Jedi master, had thought of Soresu once as a fighting style, not a state of being. He adopted its signature stances, practiced the precision spins and whirling arcs that tore attackers apart with their own hostile energy. But he was past that now. Soresu was a credo, a paradigm of the mind. The grip on his lightsaber did not matter. The lightsaber itself did not matter. Only in the light of the Force was there true strength, and that is where the old man now stood.

Kenobi's arms and shoulders shifted not into the iconic, two - finger ready stance of his signature form, but into the ungainly two - handed grip of Shii-Cho, the most basic of lightsaber combat styles. It was rudimentary in the extreme, a child's form, reserved in the late period by masters for teaching petulant children. The insult was not lost on Vader.

The Lord of the Sith advanced, Kenobi's weapon angled loosely to the side, its tip slowly arcing to eye level. "Drawing the circle," entering the ready stance of Shii-Cho, was the first movement taught to the younglings. The ready stance was the first posture Obi-Wan had shown him—no, shown Anakin.

"The circle is now complete," Vader warned his would-be instructor. "When I left you, I was but the learner. Now I am the master."

"Only a master of evil, 'Darth'," Obi-Wan taunted, as he opened the duel.

There was no power in the strike. It was a lazy, backhanded brush of the weapon toward Vader's blade. He tapped high, then low, then high, with nothing but the natural strength of his arms. Vader parried the clumsy blows easily. His own saber descended in a murderous chopping arc, and Obi-Wan met each with the flimsiest of parries. The blades squeaked and rippled in protest, but never met with a satisfying crash. Vader's attacks landed only weakly against Obi-Wan's deceptively slow-moving blade. The old man nearly met Vader head-on, once, but let his wrist go slack at the last second. He slipped out of the blade's path as it carved through his soft defenses—not with great agility, but with the slowest possible movement. It was a dance of precision, of half-inches. But Vader, seeing his enemy nearly struck, committed to the blow with his full strength, and his heavy armour betrayed him, pulling him slightly off-balance.

In that moment, if he called on the power of the Dark Side, Obi-Wan could have tried to end the fight with a powerful riposte. Even now the thirst for revenge railed in his blood. But instead of chancing the quick attack, he turned a whole useless circle with the blade. It was a spin he had made a thousand times before—but it was graceless, slow, and left a massive opening. Vader thrust in mid-spin; as if in slow motion, Obi-Wan's blade barely got in front of it. Vader pressed the attack; again the old man was a half-inch out of place as the red saber cut through a maintenance panel. Obi-Wan's counter, a direct mockery of Vader's wild, clumsy swing, was more of a taunt than a serious attack.

"Your powers are weak, old man," Vader taunted. But beneath the cool outward confidence, a growing frustration began to simmer. Beneath the black helm, beneath the armour plating, Vader's breathing and heartbeat fluctuated wildly, trying to settle into an organic rhythm. He was made for Jedi-killing, for deadly fights at full speed and strength. And yet the old man moved slower than expected, in fits and starts, and the artificial intelligence of the armour struggled to find the rhythm of the fight. He lumbered where he should have charged, second-guessed the movement of his immense body weight, and tried to focus his anger at the clumsiness of his attacks into greater speed. Kenobi was moving as if waist-deep in water, raising last-minute blocks and counters with his feeble strength of arms. Every strike against this slow, ungainly old man felt as if it would be the killing blow—yet every blow was blocked in the instant before it landed. Vader's frustration boiled in him. Even this victory would bring him no satisfaction. This was no duel. This was a mockery of his power. But try as he might, Vader could not break the fight of its plodding, graceless rhythm.

In a sudden burst of rage, Vader spun the blade forward; a gentle tap from Kenobi's weapon broke its dizzying spin before it could begin. He thrust low, bringing both weapons down, and prepared to leap over the weapons, but Obi-Wan had maneuvered them into a cramped, low-ceilinged hallway whose supports and doorways hung just above Vader's head. There was nowhere to move, no way to evade Obi-Wan's slow but surgical precision, except to match him stance for stance, keep the blade in front of his vulnerable life-support controls, and wait out the old man's stamina. Vader pressed attack after attack, but each time Kenobi just caught the edge of it with a limp, halfhearted parry. Like an animal caged by technique, Vader focused all his concentration on this mockery of a true duel and waited for the inevitable mistake.

Fumbling over their swords—one with deliberate design, the other with furious impotence—the two masters had come back down the low-ceilinged hall toward the hangar, and fought now in full view of the stormtroopers awaiting reinforcements at the  _Falcon_ 's side. Obi-Wan nudged his attacks forward in half-swings and weak thrusts, making no ground but forcing Vader's sword back to centre position. All around him, he felt the stormtroopers rushing toward the spectacle, felt the glowing children of Padmé arrive at the hangar, felt the distant troop movements as the underbelly of the station launched its own defenses to deal with him. The full squad of stormtroopers on their way—fifty or a hundred, perhaps—were heavily armed enough to destroy the ship at anchor, if need be.

Vader sensed none of these things. The whole of his mind was bent to the stupidity of this duel, the stupidity of his old master, the appalling farce of beating an old man to death with a lightsaber in the ugliest manner possible. If this was what had become of Obi-Wan, he would never again face a worthy adversary.

The troopers burst from the turbolifts and scrambled into the hangar corridor. Obi-Wan's mystical senses were confirmed by the sound of rushing footsteps. The others had broken away from the ship to watch, for they had never seen Darth Vader ignite his legendary laser weapon. To the untrained eye, their duel was sluggish, featureless—like nothing they had heard of his true power. Was he in some sort of trouble? What was the protocol for interfering with the Emperor's Supreme Commander in a fight against a Jedi Knight? There was none, as far as they knew.

Obi-Wan felt more than saw the stormtroopers surround him. They blocked off the front exit to the hangar. The full squadron rushed into the corridor behind him. Between the barriers of their skeletal armour, Darth Vader was fully preoccupied—so preoccupied that he could not feel with the Force, nor even perceive with his human senses, when his own son rushed past him, past the stormtroopers, toward the unguarded ship.

And behind him—behind them all…

 _Leia_.

That was the name Padmé had given her. It was a name without precedent in her family, a name whose meaning the heralds of Alderaan had never fully understood. There was much, now, that would never be known.

 _Leia_. He had held her in his arms, once. He did not think he would live to see her. But there she was, behind Luke, behind the smugglers, a grown woman. The future of the galaxy.

She was alive, and free, and he had seen her with his own eyes. He was happy.

Obi-Wan surrendered himself to the Force with a serene smile on his face. There was no more conflict after that—only a new hope that he had never dared to covet for himself. If Luke was destined, as Yoda had once said, to grow strong with the Force, to atone for his father's failures…perhaps Leia would one day live to heal the failures of _her_ father, too.

_Another galaxy. Another time._

There never was a record of where Jedi went, of what happened to them, when they joined the Living Force. Even to the old consulars it was something of a mystery. But when Obi-Wan gave himself over to the death he had cheated for too many years, he was suddenly in a place no lightsaber could reach him. It was not a place of unimaginable power; that was the narrow understanding of living men, the understanding of the Sith. It was a place where power no longer had meaning, a place where strength could do no harm.

Vader's opportunity came as the old man surrendered himself…to something. He did not hesitate. Hungry for a single brutal impact, exhausted and thwarted by the most unsatisfying duel of his life, Vader lunged with all his strength and clove into Obi-Wan's robe with hateful satisfaction. But the saber caught only cloth; there was no one there, as if there never had been—as if Vader had been nothing more than a fool or a madman tilting at the ghosts of his haunted past.

It was no victory. That lifeless duel, capped by Obi-Wan's disappearance, stole all hope of triumph and was a slap in the face of what little dignity Vader had left. He stepped onto the empty robe as if searching for the trick, as if the old man had somehow put a smuggling compartment in the Death Star itself. He was there, kicking at the ground helplessly, when the whole squad of stormtroopers reached him, desperate for orders. He looked up to the hangar, feeling the heartbroken twinge of an oddly familiar presence aboard the impounded ship, just as the heavy blast doors slammed shut.


	22. A Day To Celebrate

 

Gendered grief among humans was the oddest of things. In the smuggling world, males and females seemed to take on whatever roles kept them alive: their clothes and mannerisms were nearly uniform, to the extent that they sometimes fooled Chewbacca's eyes, and only his razor-sharp sense of smell could tell the equally hairless human sexes apart. Keeping a wary eye on the civilian passengers as the  _Falcon_  sped away from the Death Star, he understood perhaps it was not so everywhere.

The young male, Luke, was from the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim, one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest worlds. The young female was very clearly from one of the wealthiest houses and families in the Core. Maybe that had something to do with it; maybe not. But in the space of a few minutes they taught the Wookiee that here, in more standard human societies, males were socialized to be warriors and females to be nurturers. It was something he'd ask Loyal Han Solo about one day. Han had been shot at by many human females in his travels; if they were not normally raised to be warrior-caste, Chewbacca now wondered what their fights could possibly have been about.

The boy, having lost a single very old comrade-in-arms, was inconsolable. Slumped over the Dejarik table in abject grief, he was comforted by the girl who had lost her home, her family, her entire world, everyone she had ever known and all of their kin. He sensed an incredible strength in both of them, but there was no question: these hardest of moments were what she did best. He wondered for the first time, but not for the last, why the human females, so equipped to withstand excruciating pain and possessed of such quick little bodies in a blaster-wielding society, were casted to be caregivers, and big warm loud males the warriors.

He touched them both with exceedingly gentle paws as he passed, as if to model for the male what it was like to share in the grief of others as well as his own.

"How are we doing back there, pal?"

Chewbacca started up at the sound of Han's voice. Remembering his errand, he hurried to the power bay, hydrospanner at the ready, and wrenched off the converter cover as quickly as he could. The sound he made in response was not a proper word in Shyriiwook, but clever Han Solo understood it just the same.

"Nothing?" he called back.

Chewbacca hustled back to the cockpit. "Power converters were burned out fighting the tractor beam," he warbled. "The coils may heat up one or two systems, but we're not making a lot of fast-twitch adjustments."

"No dogfights?" Han pouted. "I love a good dogfight."

"Not without precision power controls," said Chewbacca. "This ship is going to handle like a garbage scow."

"If we hit sentry orbit, they'll blow us to bits," said Han. "How long till you can give me a jump to hyperspace?"

"Without slotting in the new converters?" Chewbacca lowered his lip into a frown. "A few minutes at best. L3's offline with no convertible power to the main banks. The Class 2 hyperdrive runs on standard, but I'll have to do some of the connecting calculations longhand."

Han's eyes betrayed his fear as he looked toward the edge of the Death Star's sentry orbit.

"We don't have that kind of time," said the smuggler. "You think that kid can shoot a cannon half as well as he shoots his mouth?"

"He'd better," Chewbacca warned. "The missiles are offline without the converters."

Han cursed. "No L3, no missiles... we got anything that  _isn't_  offline?"

Chewbacca shrugged. "Deflector shields, the main turrets, and whatever came with the ship."

Han smirked out of the corner of his mouth. "Great. So, landing gear, sublight, the Class 2, and if we're real lucky the refresher still flushes."

Chewbacca looked down at his friend. "You should get on the guns, too," he said. "We're a flying brick without the starfighter mods. A good pilot's no use up here."

"A great pilot," Han muttered as he plugged a set of emergency jump commands into the computer. "Okay, bounce us a few light-hours out, soon as we're able. Those TIEs are sublight-only; that's far enough to keep them off our tails until we can recalculate for wherever this base of hers is."

"I don't like jumps into unknown space," said Chewbacca.

The sensors rang: enemy ships. Chewbacca groaned in protest but started the calculations.

"Come on," Han urged. "It's  _space_. Big and empty. I'm sure the landscape hasn't changed much in the last standard da—"

The pair reeled in their seats as a fist-sized chunk of Alderaan's iron-nickel planetary core bounced hard off the front mandibles. Chewbacca huffed a wordless sound Wookiees only make when they're right about something.

"You've got a point," Han admitted. "Maybe put us clear of that."

Chewbacca looked back toward the guns uncertainly just as the ship profiles flashed on the little monitor.

"We're coming up on the sentry ships," Han said. "Hold 'em off! Angle the deflector shields while I charge up the main gun."

Like that, brave Han Solo was off running. "Hold them off?!" Chewbacca barked resentfully. He twiddled the stick. The notoriously lithe  _Millennium Falcon_ , operating now on the standard thruster array of a cargo ship, canted slightly and slowly toward port, then slightly and slowly to starboard as he wrenched it back.

"To spice with it," he growled, and started the hyperspace calculations.

As the males crawled into the gunnery pods, the female rushed to the cockpit. She looked over the dizzying array of controls in confusion.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked.

"Not much," the Wookiee replied. She looked at his lips, squinted her eyes as if it would somehow help her listen harder.

"No?" she asked. Chewbacca pointed to the stick. That much of the console, at least, she understood. She looked over the targeting displays, locking onto incoming fighters with a missile system that was decidedly offline.

"If you say so," she muttered, and tested the stick. At first she was barely sure it responded at all. "You're kidding."

Chewbacca saw the first visual sign of the fighters as they whizzed past overhead.

"There!" he shouted. Leia hit the intercom.

"Here they come!" she warned.

The next few minutes were a harrowing trial of opposing virtues. Above and below the  _Falcon_ 's timeworn fuselage, blossoms of gunfire erupted from twin cannons as the young men took on the circling fighters in a flurry of action, egging each other on through the commlink as they spun and blasted frantically at the fighters. In the cockpit, pinned under heavy fire and restricted to the handling of a commercial freighter, Leia steered the ship in desperate, clumsy movements to avoid the worst of the crossfire while Chewbacca aided the backup navicomputer with manual calculations—sometimes punched in using the console instruments, sometimes literally counted on his massive, furry fingers. She was doing extraordinarily well, Chewbacca realized, at guiding the ungainly ship out of harm's way just before the eerie green plasma of Imperial blaster fire tore through its weakening shields. The radiant effect of their ion engines sent shock waves through the deflector shields when they swooped too close; the magnetic interference echoed through the hull as an unearthly, monstrous howl. It was a sound that had frightened Chewbacca to his bones in the atmosphere of Kashyyyk, and he was disappointed to have no reprieve from the horror howl of the ships even here, in the supposed silence of space.

Through it all, Leia and Chewbacca continued their work in silence and diligence. It felt for long moments like a desperate last stand—until, bit by bit, the gunfire began to lighten. Solo was an accomplished shot and well trained in the use of his own turret; and amazingly enough, the boy was a crack shot with uncanny intuition.

"We might get through this," Leia breathed.

"Shields are holding," said Chewbacca. "The last fighter won't get us."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't understand you."

"I'm used to it," said Chewbacca.

She shook her head helplessly as she banked the ship: with lateral controls unresponsive, she plunged the nose downward, putting the last fighter in line with Han's rooftop cannon. Tracking it with keen eyes, he blew it apart in a shower of sparks.

"That's it!" Luke shouted over the comm. "We did it!"

"We did it!" Leia shouted. Forgetting herself, she embraced the Wookiee in the joy of the moment.

"Victory!" he barked. "Wait…"

With his nose against her oddly-shaped head-fur, he sensed a strange familiarity to her. Beneath the sweat and trace chemicals of blaster fire, beneath the lingering stink of the Imperial trash compactor, she had the scent of the old man about her. She was in the prime of her life, and he at the end of his—but their kinship was unmistakable to him.  _Ben_ , they had called him. He wished now that he had asked the old man for their whole story. All he had cared about, at the time, was money for Han.

"How're those numbers coming?" Han asked through his headset. "A couple of sentry fighters are one thing. We've got about two minutes till they scramble a squadron."

"Ready to go," huffed Chewbacca. "The first jump will give us some breathing room."

"Alright, hit it," Han ordered. "We'll get our final destination from the after the jump. I don't want to stick around and see where they keep the rest of their fighters."

"You coming up?"

"Don't wait for me," Han said, frowning. "I've gotta clean some debris out of the lateral control access panel. Some big, pompous, golden, fussy debris. Just get us out of here."

Chewbacca fed his manual calculations into the last parameters of the navicomputer. Red half-finished calculations blinked a friendly green as Chewbacca's missing numbers helped the little backup drive set its tenuous hyperlane vectors.

Through the cockpit window, her manual controls shot, Leia stood paralyzed, watching the eerie gray globe of the Death Star as it skirted the edge of the window. They had come round to face it while evading the fighters, Chewbacca realized. It might have been the first time she'd seen it from the outside. He smelled the fear in her, smelled the exhaustion—then, beneath them, traces of something that twinged only the faintest ghost of his memory, something from childhood better left forgotten.

Imperial torture drugs. Those monsters.

" _Forest floor_ ," he cursed under his breath. He caught her as she finally fell.

"Run," she managed to breathe. "We have to run." Remembering himself, Chewbacca fed the computer's calculations into the drive systems and engaged the hyperdrive. He lowered the little woman gently into the captain's chair as the sky streamed away into a phosphorescent haze of freedom.

"You're free," said Chewbacca. "You're safe now."

Leia tried to stand, then sat and composed herself when it was clear she couldn't.

"Rest," urged the Wookiee. "You shouldn't even be awake in this condition."

"I don't understand you," she breathed. "I'm sorry."

Chewbacca moved a paw in front of his face, blinking his eyes.

"I don't suppose you understand me, either," she sighed at last. "It's just as well. I couldn't say this if you did."

Chewbacca cocked his head.

"I can't do this," she said. "I can't—after what I've seen, after all that's happened. I…my father's mission…" Salty tears came rushing to her eyes.

"Ben believed in more—" Chewbacca began, then stopped. It was no good trying. He nodded sympathetically.

"My father's dead, now," she said. "My father, my mother, my sisters. Everyone on my world. My  _world_. I…can't see any hope after that. Against that  _thing_. The numbers we had…we lost almost our whole force at Scarif."

It was just as well she couldn't understand him. Chewbacca had no words for this.

She sobbed softly to herself for a long moment, and he hung his head. They were alone in the cockpit beneath a shimmering curtain of light as the ship barrelled through hyperspace. Down the corridor, Han cursed as he painstakingly fished the fussing protocol droid out of a tangle of wires.

It did not take long for the destination alarm to ring. "What's that?" Leia asked, instinctively.

"Something that might help," said the Wookiee, preparing to ease out of hyperspace.

"I'm sorry," she said. "If we survive this—if any of us survive—I'll try to learn."

Chewbacca shrugged and hauled back on the controls. The glow of hyperspace melted away into the peaceful silence of nowhere.

"Where are we?" Leia asked. "That was an awfully short jump."

"Nowhere," Chewbacca said, since it didn't matter what he said.

"Where are we going?"

Chewbacca pointed to Leia's face, then to where her beating heart was, then panned his paw across the stars.

"That's up to you," he warbled.

Leia bit her lip. "Anywhere?"

Chewbacca nodded, pointing to her heart again.

The blackness of space was enticing. "I want to run," she said.

"Hmm?" Chewbacca's sniff was no real word in any language.

"They barely tried to stop our escape at all," she said. "I think they're tracking us. I'd only lead them straight to the others—the  _last_  of the others. There's no hope. There's no counter-attack. We run far away—as far away as you'll take us. And we wait for death there."

Chewbacca shook his head.

"You  _can_  understand me," she said. "You understand that—that  _man_  with you. Look, I…I just want to run away. Please help me. I can't do this anymore."

Gently, with the lightest of touches, Chewbacca took her by the shoulders and rotated the captain's chair a quarter-turn to port.

"Look far," he said, immodestly holding back the fur from his hairless fingertip so she could see precisely where he was pointing.

Han would not have been happy with how short a jump he had made. The backup hyperdrive was not fast, nor were its calculations as efficient as the  _Falcon_ 's legendary primary systems. Two light-hours, in the grand scale of things, was not far at all. But to sublight ships like the fighters, it was more than a billion miles—enough to keep them safe while they calculated a long-range course even on the slower computer.

More importantly, it was the right place to say goodbye.

Leia followed his naked finger with her eyes. It didn't take her long to see the yellow star, shining larger and brighter than all the rest, the way a small moon would look from a planet's surface, but glowing with such heat that it was still hard to look at its pinpoint directly.

"What is it—" she began to ask. And then she saw it.

In the grand scale, two light-hours was not far at all. But it was enough. East of the looming star, gleaming golden where its sun's rays kissed its cloudy surface, a tiny blue jewel stood out perfect and pure against the relentless blackness of space. For as long as she dared to look, Alderaan floated there peacefully, as it had for four billion years.  
"But it's gone," she breathed.

 _From a certain point of view,_ said… something. A voice. Some comforting presence, echoing from a place inside her she could not name.  
Chewbacca did not know if she would weep. The human was completely unreadable. In truth, she dried her eyes, but one at a time, as if looking away would make it come untrue. She sat motionless, drinking in her fill of the sight one last time. She knew it was the last time she would ever see her home—and yet, in only a few minutes, the light itself would catch up to them. She could not bear to see her world destroyed twice in one day.

" _We celebrate a day of peace,_ " Chewbacca whispered to himself reverently. " _A day that brings the promise that one day we'll be free._ " He thought of his own homeworld and his family, wondering now if there were other Death Stars waiting for them, too. Wondering if Kashyyyk were still there, or if had already been destroyed. Wondering how far away he would have to fly, now, to see his home and his people as they had once been. Even the glimmering blue ghost of this ruined world filled him with a sense of something greater than himself. It seemed to do the same for her.

When she turned back to him, any trace of weakness was gone from her. Her voice was clear, her eyes bright, her young face heavy with conviction.

"Chart a course for Yavin Prime," she said. "It's a gas giant in the Yavin system, in the Gordian reach. I'll direct you to the base when we arrive."

Chewbacca obligingly punched in the system and set the navicomputer to its task. At the sound of Han's approach, he stood and prepared to vacate the cockpit. When human emotions became too much guesswork for him, it helped him to think of mechanical things. Only he was aware of how much below the  _Falcon_ 's potential the ship was performing after the burnout of its converters, the tussle with interdictors and the Death Star's tractor beam, the battering of a dogfight, the numerous repairs that had been needed but unaffordable for months on end.

He knew by now how these things usually went. Before long they'd be on the ground, and he'd be desperately rushing to see whether the scavenged spare parts of the battered Rebel fleet that was pulverized over Scarif could somehow be slotted into the  _Falcon_ 's mongrel systems to repair the damage done in the firefight and restore the ship's legendary aftermarket maneuverability. Unwieldy level flight through realspace like an ordinary cargo hulk never sat well with wild Han Solo; the fully restored systems would put a thrill in him. He'd make a show of self-interest, as he always did; then the thrill of the fight and his own smoldering hatred of the Empire would get the better of him, as it always did. Chewbacca scowled at the mess Han had made of the lateral control cables, and set to work patching the guts of the ship properly as he felt the hyperdrive winding up for the second jump. He knew better than anyone what the ship would soon be called on to do—and poor old Chewbacca with it.

 _What was it all for?_  he thought, as he often did.  _Why keep fighting, after all that's happened?_ But this time, watching Leia's resolve come back to her as she stared out at the luminous ghost of her little blue world, he had an answer for his cynical smuggler's heart.

" _The promise that one day we'll be free_ ," he repeated in old classical Shyriiwook, rumbling the words of the old song reverently as he slumped behind the Dejarik table.

"Goodness gracious me," piped a mechanical voice. "This is hardly the time for poetry!"

Chewbacca shot his head round. The golden-skinned protocol droid was still slumped on the bench where Han had tossed it.

"You can understand me?" he hooted curiously.

"Well, of course I can," said the droid. "I am C-3PO, human-cyborg relations."

"Human," Chewbacca frowned. "I suppose that includes Wookiees where you're from?"

"Quite naturally," said the droid. "I am fluent in over six million forms of communication, and Shyriiwook is one of the high ambassadorial languages of the Republic. I would be a poor protocol droid indeed if I could not make sense of it."

"There is no Republic," said Chewbacca. "The Republic is dead."

"Impossible," said C-3PO. "Surely I would remember such a momentous occasion as the fall of the Republic. You travel in the esteemed presence of Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan. While she is aboard, this vessel is properly deemed a consular ship, and you ought not to say such dreadful things here."

"It's nice to talk—to be  _heard—_ by someone new," said the Wookiee. "Someone with hope. An optimist."

The golden lights behind the droid's eyes flickered as it computed. "An optimist? Me? Oh dear."

"She's a very special woman, isn't she?"

"Quite," said the droid. "More special than she knows."

"Do you believe in the Force?" Chewbacca asked.

"I'm afraid I don't understand the question," said C-3PO.

The Wookiee shrugged. Some new light filled him, some hope that perhaps there was still a galaxy worth fighting for. He understood, now, how the human woman Leia had become a chieftain of her people.

"You play Dejarik?" he asked.

"I am programmed to perform at a Galactic Interzonal competitive level in nine hundred parlour games and diversions of civil society," said the droid. "Though—circumstances being what they are—I am inclined to let you win."

The Wookiee huffed with satisfaction as the ship roared again into the safety of hyperspace, rocketing toward a brighter tomorrow.

"I think I've just made a new friend," he said.


	23. Epilogue

 

He could be loud when he was running his mouth, but a lifetime of smuggling had otherwise left Han Solo intensely quiet, intensely private, and the short peace of the New Republic had done little to change him. He was groomed like a Senator now—he had to be, to walk these halls—but Chewbacca knew that wild space was still in his veins.

Leia knew it, too. She waited for them in the hush of the Senate's great receiving foyer when the other great Senators had gone. Like vast and branchless trees, the stone columns of the Coruscant Senate building towered overhead. It was a place for whispers, for secrets—but even before they embraced, Chewbacca knew her latest secret. His fur had begun to grey—so had Han's, to his surprise—but his sense of smell was as uncanny as ever.

"Chewie," she said, grinning, meeting him first. He cradled her more gently than usual, especially around the middle.

She stroked the fabric of his long, red robe. "Look at you," she said. "Handsome as a Royal Guard in that getup." The words stung him, but she meant well.

"Me?" he said. "Look at Han Solo." Han was overjoyed to see her, but embarrassed to be seen in a ceremonial robe two feet too long for him. The combination produced the queerest smile—the kind only he could smile.

"Does this mean what I think it means?" Leia asked.

Han finally beamed from ear to ear. "I'm pleased to report, Your Worshipfullness, the operation was a success."

"Kashyyyk. Is. Free." Chewbacca said. Each of those three words was sacred on its own. It made him nearly dizzy to say them together. Tears stained his furry face—and hers.

"All right, pal, all right," Han said, patting his high shoulder. "It was a good day. A real good day."

"It's about to get better," Chewbacca said knowingly. He ruffled his old friend's hair and walked away from the pair, basking in the grandeur of the Senate hall as he left them to their private reunion. Imperial Centre—no, Coruscant, he corrected himself—was a city-world of highs and lows, with buildings stretching a mile or more above the dark clouds that were finally beginning to fade in the undercity. After all the nightmare-stories, he thought he would despise it—but here, the humans lived not so different from Wookiees, shuttling here and there from one metal treetop to the next. He marveled at the sprawling columns and the great yawning Senate roof, immensely proud. He was the first of the Wookiees to return, but he would not be the last. The delegation was only a few standard days behind them, now. He could have been a part of them—their chief or vice-chief, maybe—but for his life-debt. It was a debt he had never been prouder to hold.

Leia had work to do, of course, before the big speech. It was her way. He would not see her in private again until the Wookiees had arrived to reconnect with the Senators. But he waited patiently until Han staggered over, his face dumbstruck, overjoyed, terrified, rapturous.

"A father," he breathed. "I'm gonna be a father."

Chewbacca threw a long arm around him and hugged him tight.

"I never—I just—I never imagined. What am I gonna do, Chewie?"

"Be a father," said Chewbacca.

"I don't know where to start." He looked like a lost pet.

"The Wookiees have a proverb," Chewbacca said. "Start with a name, and the story will come."

"Maybe… maybe we'll name her after my mother."

Chewbacca blinked. Han never talked about his mother.

"I mean that's what it's all about, isn't it, pal? Mothers and daughters."

"And fathers and sons," Chewbacca reminded him.

Han nodded absently. "Yeah. Those too. What if—what if it's a boy?"

Chewbacca still remembered Leia's father. He didn't hesitate. "If it's a boy," he said softly, "name him Ben."

Han looked up at the Wookiee. "Not bad, Chewie. Not bad at all."

Dragging his sacred robe on the ground—as was his way in life, maybe—Han walked arm and arm with his friend into the Senate. They'd have the best seat in the house for her first formal address to the New Republic—the best, maybe, except for one. The sprawling Grand Convocation Chamber of the Galactic Senate was a little the worse for wear, but it was still standing; filled again to the brim by ambassadors from a thousand freed worlds, it was buzzing with nervous tension.

After twenty-five years, the ambassadorial repulsorpod for Alderaan was still intact. Occupying a place of special honour, it was there the two retired smugglers sat as Mon Mothma addressed the assembly, discussing the logistics of moving the New Republic's capital to her own homeworld. Chewbacca hooted nervously, peering over the side of the pod. It seemed fitting, in a way—the two of them, forever homeless among the stars, in the one pod that had no home planet.

High above in the hall, a solitary figure watched from the long-deserted Jedi Temple's balcony. Luke had healed physically from his ordeal on the second Death Star, but there was still a remoteness in him, a deep scarring darkness that could not be willed away. Below him, on a floating platform awaiting her own turn to speak from the old Chancellor's podium, Leia waited, resplendent in white, her hair styled in the impractical manner of Alderaanian nobility for the first time in years.

Han's heart ached for her. After all she had done in the War, she would speak to the people like a mother, a saint. He knew she would be terrified. And yet there she was, floating before the assembly like a regal queen, strong and fierce—as if some lingering presence cloaked her in its calming light.

Even Chewbacca stared in mute awe as she stepped into the light and began to unite the people. Han turned to his old friend, eyebrow raised.

"I think I might just be the luckiest man in the galaxy," he beamed. "I know you don't go in for us ugly human-types—but look at her, pal. She's beautiful, isn't she?"

Chewbacca watched her with the eyes of age, nodding solemnly.

"I imagine she is," he answered. "From a certain point of view."

##  **THE END**


End file.
